Pathway To Higher Education: Bridging The Digital Divide

As part of the effort to prepare future Information Technology (IT) workers, the Center for Information Technology and Community Development (CITCD) at the College of Applied Science at the University of Cincinnati established the Summer Academy of Information Technology (SAIT), a summer enrichment program that introduces high school students in under-served communities to IT. The first session of SAIT was scheduled for a two-week period. The development of the program faced several challenges in the area of recruiting students, administration, pedagogy and others. One of the main challenges in designing the program was in developing the curriculum, which had to address several focus areas of IT and be appropriate for the level of understanding of high school students from varied (and often unknown or unclear) backgrounds. Project-based learning was the pedagogical approach employed within the program. The curriculum had to be general enough to match the diverse backgrounds of the students and at the same time specific enough to enable them to finish a relevant, non-trivial IT project within the two-week time period in order for them to experience tangible proof of what they had learned and accomplished. This paper reports on the development of the SAIT and on the results of implementing it for the first SAIT session during summer 2002.