Funder: National Science Foundation, Award #194869

• Principal Investigator: S. Monisha Pulimood, Professor and Chair, TCNJ Department of Computer Science, Barbara Myers Pelson ’59 Chair for Faculty-Student Engagement
• Co-PI: Diane Bates, Professor, TCNJ Professor of Sociology

Project website

This project aims to serve the national interest by studying how interdisciplinary collaborations in the classroom can improve STEM learning for all undergraduates. The increasingly interdisciplinary and complex issues facing our society requires diverse, STEM-literate experts from a range of fields who can work and solve problems in collaboration. Addressing this national need requires innovative, research-based teaching practices that retain students and improve STEM learning. This project will expand, improve, and study an innovative curricular model in which two undergraduate courses from different disciplines are taught in coordination. The instructors, goals, and outcomes of each course will be distinct, but the courses will be connected by a science-focused project that is developed through an active collaboration with a community partner. By the end of the project, 750 students will have experienced this model, allowing for a comprehensive evaluation of its effectiveness. Furthermore, over a dozen faculty members in different disciplines will be trained in using effective strategies for teaching STEM concepts. This project will contribute to educational strategies that can produce the STEM-literate workforce needed to tackle the pressing interdisciplinary problems of our time.

Funders: New Jersey Council of the Humanities , College Music Society

Community partners: Trenton Public Schools, Trenton Historical Society, Trenton’s Conservatory Mansion,  Laura Poll and her volunteers at Trenton Public Library, Beyond Expectations

• Project co-director: Teresa Marrin Nakra, Associate Professor, Music and Interactive Multimedia Departments, The College of New Jersey
• Podcast and event host and co-producer: Sarah Dash

Project website

The goal of the Trenton Makes Music project is to document the stories of the people, places and policies that made Trenton a hidden treasure of the music world. We are collecting oral histories, mapping key locations and otherwise documenting this history as a resource for educators, city leaders and other interested stakeholders. It also serves as a test bed and springboard for prospective new education research initiatives.

Funder: National Science Foundation
Award #1141170
Duration: 2012-2015
Project website

Partial abstract To adequately prepare a workforce for the changing economic and global landscape, the project is developing a model that enables students with diverse perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds to learn how to collaborate and integrate concepts from their respective fields to develop technology-based solutions for complex real-world problems. The model includes collaboration with a community partner, making it practical for the many campuses with community engaged learning curricula.

Award abstract: Computing Education is essential not only for Computer Science and its many sibling disciplines(Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Information Systems, etc.) but for practically all other academic disciplines. Computers are pervasive today and many professionals develop basic programming skills as a way to express ideas, problems and solutions in computational terms within their own disciplines. It is common to find curricula in the arts (music, graphical design), business (accounting, economics), sciences (biology, chemistry, physics), and social sciences with computational courses in their curriculum. In a way, computing is becoming a requirement of most professional degrees. This project addresses both the separation between computing specialists and to widespread integration of computing concepts, not just the technology but computational thinking, in other disciplines. The project will use technologies now commonly available to permit faculty to collaborate in offering courses that extend the potential reach of experts to a broader audience, as well as a collection of recorded expert lectures. In addition, it will develop a visual, interactive interface to a common framework around which to explore similarities and differences across domains and to enable decisions about educational plan development. The teams will also host workshops to identify innovative approaches to teaching, as well as support initiation of new collaborative course experience and reflect of the utility of the courses. The opportunity computing education is to learn how motivated hands-on learning can engage students and provide opportunities to introduce computing concepts. In addition to aiming for diversity in the groups of participating faculty, the project will extend the reach of computing to disciplines not normally associated with that content and will also represent the scope of their discipline to computing students, providing a broader view of the impact of the discipline as it is applied in creative fields. This project addresses the growing conviction that inter-disciplinary approaches are crucial to revitalizing computing education and offers a solution to the need for broader reach of individual areas of expertise. If successful,