DO-IT Partners in Two New National Science Foundation Grants

Date: 
Tuesday, September 9, 2014

DO-IT and collaborators in the College of Engineering have been awarded two new National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, AccessEngineering and AccessCSForAll. 

AccessEngineering

AccessEngineering, a collaboration with the University of Washington (UW) College of Engineering, will help engineering faculty nationwide:

  1. Better serve a diverse student body that includes students with disabilities in engineering courses and programs, and
  2. Integrate relevant disability-related and universal design content into engineering courses.

In doing so, the project will support the goal of increasing the participation of people with disabilities in education and careers in engineering and improve engineering fields with their perspectives and expertise.

The project is funded under NSF's Broadening Participation in Engineering Strategy Track for $836,435 over the course of three years, beginning September 15, 2014. Sheryl Burgstahler, Director of DO-IT, is the Principle Investigator (PI) for the project. Two UW faculty members—Maya Cakmak, assistant professor in Computer Science and Engineering, and Katherine Steele, assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering—are Co-PIs. Fourteen representatives from universities nationwide will serve on the Faculty Leadership Team.

AccessCSForAll

AccessCSForAll: Including Students with Disabilities in Computing Education for the Twenty-First Century is a collaboration between UW's Department of Computer Science and Engineering, DO-IT, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). The project aims to increase the successful participation of students with disabilities in K-12 education by:

  1. Building the capacity of Exploring Computer Science (ECS) and Computer Science Principles (CSP) high school teachers to serve students with disabilities through professional development training and individual real-time support, and
  2. Creating accessible materials - both tools and curricular units - that ECS and CSP teachers can use in their classrooms.

The project is funded for close to a million dollars over the course of three years, beginning September 1, 2014. At UW, Richard Ladner, professor of Computer Science and Engineering, is a Principle Investigator (PI) and Sheryl Burgstahler is co-PI. At UNLV, Andreas Stefik, assistant professor of Computer Science, is a PI. Project partners include recipients of NSF grants related to K-12 computing education as well as other stakeholders.

For more information, visit the NSF award descriptions for  AccessEngineering and AccessCSForAll.