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Empowering Autistic High School Students for Tomorrow's Tech
Our Vision
Attracting diverse youth to computer science professions is important to our national interests and to provide economic opportunity. We engage high school students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in a remote video game design and software development summer camp.
Through teamwork activities, participating youth develop and practice communication and collaboration skills while growing their professional knowledge and skills to prepare them for potential careers in computer science.
Embedding student learning in a virtual summer camp environment provides participating high schoolers with the opportunity to develop knowledge and skills for remote work, which is increasingly common in computer science careers.
Research
Over the past three summers, our EdASE team has hosted innovative virtual camps for young autistic talents, focusing on video game development. Our primary goal is to unlock and nurture these students’ potential. These camps also serve as a hub for pioneering research in autism and computer science education. We’ve seen transformative effects on students’ communication and collaboration skills. Our mission remains twofold: to make computer science inclusive for neurodivergent individuals and contribute to research in this area. Join us on this journey
Participation in EdASE Research
By granting permission for your child to participate in research activities at our camp, you support our efforts to advance computer science education tailored for neurodiverse individuals. Participation won’t significantly impact your child’s camp experience, and they may not recall the research component. At the end of the camp, we collect feedback from every student in a group setting to enhance future camp experiences. If you have any concerns or queries about the research aspect of EDASE, please feel free to contact us.
Publications
- Kokinda, E.; Moster, M.; Rodeghero, P. and Boyer, D. (2024). Informal Learning Opportunities: Neurodiversity, Self-Efficacy, Motivation for Programming Interest. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU; ISBN 978-989-758-697-2; ISSN 2184-5026, SciTePress, pages 413-426. DOI: 10.5220/0012710400003693
- Makayla Moster, Ella Kokinda, D. Matthew Boyer, and Paige Rodeghero. 2024. Experiences with Summer Camp Communication via Discord. In Proceedings of the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 56–65. https://doi.org/10.1145/3639474.3640067
- Makayla Moster, Ella Kokinda, Matthew Re, James Dominic, Jason Lehmann, Andrew Begel, and Paige Rodeghero. 2022. "Can you help me?": an experience report of teamwork in a game coding camp for autistic high school students. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 50–61. https://doi.org/10.1145/3510456.3514154
- Begel, A., Dominic, J., Phillis, C., Beeson, T., Rodeghero, P. "How a Remote Video Game Coding Camp Improved Autistic College Students' Self-Efficacy in Communication", in Proc. of the 51st Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE’21), Toronto, Canada, March 13-20, 2021.
- 🎉🎉🎉 Best Paper Award! 🎉🎉🎉
- [paper link]
EdASE in Other Media
- The Accessible Computer Science Education Fall Workshop Invited Talk at Microsoft: "How a Remote Video Game Coding Camp Improved Autistic College Students' Self-Efficacy in Communication" (November 2020)
- Empirical Software Engineering Banter Podcast with Margaret Anne D Storey: "Lessons learned from an Autism Coding Camp: A Q&A with Andrew Begel and Paige Rodeghero" (December 2020)
Leadership Team
Paige Rodeghero, Ph.D
Clemson University
Andrew Begel, Ph.D
Carnegie Mellon
D. Matthew Boyer, Ph.D.
Clemson University
LET'S TALK!
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This material is based upon work supported by the National Foundation under grant ITEST-2148720. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in the material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.