CSEE’s Marie desJardins is currently collaborating with Maryland educators and researchers for the NSF-funded CS10K Teacher Training Project. The project seeks to change how computer science is taught by high school teachers. Researchers work together with high school teachers to craft new curricula for high school computer science programs. This project is unique in that actual high school teachers are creating the new curricula, rather than professional curriculum writers. The CS10K Maryland Project team includes faculty from UMCP, as well as high school teachers from Charles County and Baltimore County.

The CS10K team has facilitated the creation of “a complete curriculum package for a new College Board Advanced Placement (AP) course called CS Principles.” Originally, the goal of the CS10K team was to train 10,000 teachers to teach computer science in 10,000 schools nationwide. The project has been revised to reflect its new goal of training teachers in all U.S. schools.

In academia there is a growing concern that females–as well as minorities and those with disabilities–are being repeatedly discouraged from pursuing programming in high school. Professor desJardins is trying to change this by directing the CS Matters in MD Project. (CS Matters in MD is part of the larger, NSF-supported initiative known as CS 10K.)

“I believe that CS should be included throughout the K-12 curriculum as a set of basic skills and knowledge for today’s world,” desJardins said. “All citizens of the 21st century, especially the next generation of knowledge workers, will benefit greatly from learning about computational thinking and the problem-solving skills that are a core part of computer science.”

In addition, desJardins explains that, “We need to expand the pool of available workers to fill the many computing-related jobs that our economy demands, and in order to be sure that the technology we develop is robust and useful, we need to increase the diversity of the computer scientists who take those jobs.  To meet these goals, we must broaden our notion of what it means to teach computer science (beyond just teaching coding skills), and we must reach a broader audience at an earlier age.  Our ‘CS Matters in Maryland’ project is particularly focused on creating appealing and engaging curriculum materials for the newly announced AP CS Principles course, and on training teachers to deliver this material effectively to a diverse population of learners.”

More information about CS Matters in Maryland and the CS10K Project can be found here.

UMBC’s Imaging Research Center is looking for student programmers to assist in ongoing projects. Current projects range from websites to mobile apps. Such projects include web based panorama viewer, working with Unity to develop mobile apps, developing a web based story sharing social network, developing a image archive/gallery, and more. Projects are assigned as seen fit. Work will begin in January 2015.

Do you enjoy programming challenges? Do you enjoy learning new skills? Are you passionate about writing software that could potentially be used by thousands of users daily? If so, this is a great opportunity for you.

Duties:

• Maintain existing projects from websites to mobile apps
• Develop web based solutions
• Develop mobile based solutions
• Assist in ongoing projects
• Other duties as assigned

Requirements:

• Ability to program in C, C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, Python
• Knowledge of web technologies: HTML, CSS, Javascript, Php, MySQL
• Quick learner
• Able to work well in groups
• Excellent troubleshooting skills
• Excellent communication skills
• Available to work up to 20 hours a week during the semester and up to 40
  hours a week during the summer
• Active UMBC student.

Desires:

• Major in Computer Science or other related field
• Experience with the HTML5 <canvas> tag and/or WebGL is a plus
• Experience developing iOS/Android apps is a plus
• Experience with Unity and/or Unreal is a plus
• Experience with UNIX/Linux is a plus
• Experience with git, svn, or other revision control systems is a plus

Submit resumes by email to Mark Jarzynski, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. Please provide an example of a programming project that you were passionate about.

Mark Jarzynski, Technical Director / Programmer, Imaging Research Center, UMBC, ITE 101G, 410-455-1498

The Summer Urological Research Experience (SURE), is a great opportunity for students to move beyond the classroom learning experience to gather the knowledge and skills needed to pursue a career founded in the biomedical sciences.  SURE is designed to provide a one of a kind research experience to students in the hope to foster an interest in students in the areas of urological and cancer research. 

The James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute provides a unique opportunity for young scientists to work alongside some of the leading researchers in urology and oncology while utilizing a broad range of techniques and methodologies. The Department has the unique ability of providing young researchers with a chance to see how research done at the bench can be translated into patient care.

In addition to the vast amount of research experience that will be gained during the program, students will be given numerous opportunities to attend lectures and seminars given by the University's and the  Department's numerous gifted faculty that will prepare them for the paradigms, problems, and technologies in biomedical research. 

In addition to providing participants with both theoretical knowledge and practical training in research and scientific experimentation and other scholarly investigations, the program offers a stipend of $3,000 for the ten weeks that the program is active. Housing is provided near our undergraduate campus and the University maintains a shuttle service that provides convenient transportation between the medical school campus and the undergraduate campus.

This year the program is scheduled to run from Sunday, May 24th through Saturday, August 1st, 2015.  Interested parties should have their application materials submitted no later than February 1st, 2015.

This summer internship program requires a full-time commitment. Interns should be prepared for long days and short weekends. It is not permissible to take academic classes or hold other employment during this internship. There are no vacations during the program.

Critical Social Justice organizers Amelia Meman, Lisa Gray, and Megan Tagle Adams share a few of their thoughts about self-care in/as social justice work. 

AMELIA: Coming up on CSJ 2015, I’m thinking about generosity, compassion, and sustainability, especially in regard to how these connect with movement building and the self. I think about generosity in regard to the tough situations we get into (the difficult dialogues, you could say), and how I and others should be cognizant about the differences we are bringing into conversations and the mutual respect we all deserve; the generosity we extend is integral to building bridges and coalition. With our selves, in small conversations, in bigger conversations, between movements, I hope we can strive for generosity while continuing to work towards a more critical engagement. Compassion is directly related to how I try to deal with both myself, and others. I try to be aware of the needs of others, to listen and learn from them, to care and empower them, while also trying to know when I need to take care of myself—when I need compassion. This act of self-care and the generosity above are crucial to both my sustainability as a (critical) social justice warrior and to Critical Social Justice itself. As we work towards building a campus initiative that will continue into the years, I am focused on all three of the aspects—generosity, compassion, and sustainability—the cyclical nature between them, and the way they affect both our groups and the individuals in them.

LISA: Yes, Amelia. Your idea of of viewing social justice movement building through the lenses of generosity, compassion and sustainability resonates with me! Far too often, those of us who engage in what we hope is (critical) and reflective social justice work, here at UMBC and beyond, short change the “how” of the work as it relates to self care and community care. It’s hard to be generous with our energies, talents, and skills or have compassion for others when we don’t take the time to give it to ourselves first. And yes, as Audre Lorde so beautifully stated, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” As I think about both my personal role as well as the Student Life Mosaic Center’s role in actively supporting sustainability for CSJ in 2015 and beyond, I believe it can happen only by intentionally engaging in high levels of generosity and compassion as well as empathy and self-reflection. I believe that empathy will help us better relate to one another’s unique positionality as we move through the intersectional aspects of our shared work while self-reflection will keep us honest about how our privileged and underrepresented identities either help or hinder the impact of that work. This year’s theme of Creating Brave Spaces provides a great platform for us to use generosity, compassion, empathy and self-reflection to help our campus to learn and grow as educators, activists and (critical) social justice change agents in person or online.

MEGAN: Amelia and Lisa, that quote from Audre Lorde that you both reference has also been instrumental in shaping my own approach to self-care and sustainability in doing social justice work. While social media has made it much easier for me to constantly learn about various social justice issues and perspectives that I may not have otherwise encountered, I’m also trying to be mindful of the impact of this immersion. I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the (perhaps self-imposed) pressure to be all in at all times. When I feel intellectually and emotionally exhausted after a long day of engaging in these difficult dialogues, even scrolling through Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook doesn’t provide much of a respite since my feeds are about 90% feminism-related and 10% cat pictures. However, for me it’s been helpful to shift my understanding of what self-care looks like so that it doesn’t necessarily mean taking a break from social change work but rather re-framing my own commitment social justice as an act of self-preservation and self-care in itself.

For all of those interested in being involved in the planning process for UMBC's Take Back the Night, please fill out this form. 

If you serve on the committee, please plan to be available to also volunteer on the night of the event, April 16th, from roughly 5-9:30pm.

Planning meetings will be held every two weeks on Wednesdays at noon.
For more information, contact Jess at womens.center@umbc.edu.

REU Program

Filmmaker Matthew Coakley of Blue Mantle Media created this amazing drone-assisted video of Baltimore.

Coakley comments on the video:

“It features Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, the Raven’s M&T Bank Stadium, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, National Aquarium, the Baltimore Convention Center, Federal Hill, Fells Points, The Pride of Baltimore memorial, The Pride of Baltimore II, Patterson Park, Penn Station, Power Plant, and more.
..
To film this I used a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter, with a GoPro Hero4 mounted on a Zenmuse H3-3D gimbal. I hope to eventually upgrade to a higher-end system, but you work with what you’ve got…and it’s still incredible the types of shots achievable with such a small piece of equipment!”