Programming Together at UVA: A Proposal for a Computer Science Mentorship Program; Relationships with Technology: How it is in the Home and in the Classroom

In this portfolio, I will be presenting two separate projects that I worked on throughout the length of my fourth year as an undergraduate student. The first project is my technical report, a proposal for a computer science mentorship program. The second project is my STS research paper, a delve into the relationship between technology in the classroom and in the home. My technical project is a proposal for a computer science mentorship program at the University of Virginia. This program would allow for first-year students who wish to pursue a degree in computer science to be mentored by fourth-year computer science majors. This program would incentivize fourth-year students to enroll by counting as a three credit computer science elective. This proposal is motivated by my own experiences at the University of Virginia. As a first-year, I sometimes found myself lacking someone who could help guide me through the experience of being at this university. As a fourth-year, I found myself wishing there was some way I could leave a lasting mark on the university. These reasons are what motivated me to propose this program. The program itself would be a semester long and would require mentors and mentees to meet for at least an hour every two weeks. There would also be group mentoring sessions that would occur every three weeks. There would be an orientation and kickoff event at the beginning of the semester and a wrap-up party at the end. My hope for this program would be to improve the first-year experience for the mentees and to provide a great opportunity for mentoring experience for the fourth-year mentors. My STS research paper is about asking the question, how does a student’s relationship with technology at home impact their relationship with technology in the classroom? This question is inspired by my own experiences with technology and from the change I have seen in how much technology is used in classrooms over my life as a student. In order to analyze these relationships, I used the STS framework of Actor-network theory. In exploring these connections, I focused on digital inequality and digital literacy, the effects on academic performance, and on how the beliefs of both parents and teachers play into this. When it came to digital inequality and digital literacy, socioeconomic status was the most important factor in affecting a student’s relationship with technology. Using the framework of Actor-network theory, I made the conclusion that it is important how much responsibility of work we allow students to delegate to technology. This is because too much of this delegation will only lead to harming a student's development of a healthy connection with technology. I found that the way a student interacts with technology at home and in the classroom both affect one another. I also highlight the importance of the beliefs that the parents and the teachers of a student have when it comes to affecting their relationship with technology. It is the responsibility of both parents and teachers to help students develop healthy relationships with technology across the home and the classroom. Both of these projects are founded by my experiences as a computer science major. Although there is not a direct link between these two projects, I think it is important to highlight how these topics are ones that I landed on because of my admiration for computer science. Understanding technology and how people interact with it is paramount to many aspects of being a computer scientist, and this is why my STS paper explores the connection between technology in the home and classroom for students. My technical project proposes this mentorship program because I view it as something valuable that could improve the experience of being a computer science student at the University of Virginia. At the end of the day, these projects exist because of my choice to pursue my degree in computer science, a choice I will always be glad that I made.