Co-Teaching Computer Science Across Borders: Human-Centric Learning at Scale

Programming is fast becoming a required skill set for students in every country. We present CS Bridge, a model for cross-border co-teaching of CS1, along with a corresponding open-source course-in-a-box curriculum made for easy localization. In the CS Bridge model, instructors and student-teachers from different countries come together to teach a short, stand-alone CS1 course to hundreds of local high school students. The corresponding open-source curriculum has been specifically designed to be easily adapted to a wide variety of local teaching practices, languages, and cultures. Over the past six years, the curriculum has been used to teach CS1 material to over 1,000 high school students in Colombia, the Czech Republic, Turkey, and Guinea. A large majority of our students continue on to study CS or CS-related fields in university. More importantly, many of our undergraduate student-teachers stay involved with teaching beyond the program. Joint teaching creates a positive, high-quality learning experience for students around the world and a powerful, high-impact professional development experience for the teaching team---instructors and student-teachers alike.