Teaching Technology for Community

Abstract

Technology for Community is an undergraduate computer science course taught at the University of Colorado under the auspices of the Institute for Women and Technology’s Virtual Development Center. In the course, students use computers to do community service. More specifically, they work with local community service agencies, building computational solutions to problems confronting those agencies. Student projects are developed following the method of task-centered design and are evaluated by the students and the users according to three formal methods. In this chapter, we describe in detail the content of the course and review the design and evaluation methods we use.