Collegiate Times

The Living in the KnowlEdge Society Community Building Project (LIKES) at Virginia Tech was awarded a $289,999 grant out of the $498,957 grant on July 17, 2007 from the National Science Foundation's Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education program.

The LIKES project was developed by several investigators from Tech with the intent to globally educate students and teachers about the importance of incorporating computers into various disciplines. The project aims to enlighten teachers about various computer-related concepts they can use in the classroom. It also seeks to give students information about the fundamentals of creating a connection between computers and their classes while using computers effectively and efficiently.

"The purpose of the LIKES project is to build a global community," said founder of the project and professor of computer science, Edward A. Fox.

The LIKES project wants to "revitalize computing education," said Christopher Zobel, associate professor of business information technology.

The LIKES project at Tech is run by Fox and Zobel, as well as Carlos Evia, assistant professor of professional writing; Weiguo (Patrick) Far, associate professor of accounting and information systems/computer science; and Steven Sheetz, associate professor of accounting and information systems.

The project has spread to other universities as well. VillanovaUniversity (with investigator Robert Beck), North Carolina A&T (with investigator Ed Carr) and Santa Clara University (with investigator Wingyan Chung) are three other universities involved in the project. Each of these universities received the remainder of the nearly half-a-million dollar grant.

The grant awarded to the Tech LIKES project will go towards a series of four workshops set up at the other participating universities, the first at Santa Clara on November 29.
"These workshops will help discover goals and find how to teach" the fundamentals of computer science and will "find what's that best way to teach these concepts," Fox said.
Along with the various workshops, members of the LIKES project plan to incorporate the project's ideas into the liberal education curriculum in the fall.

The LIKES project aims to "create new courses or adapt" current courses to include the LIKES concepts in various computer-related and non-computer-related disciplines, Evia said.

By incorporating the LIKES ideas and concepts into the core curriculum, LIKES investigators hope to give students who are not in computing majors or minors exposure about how computers help in different disciplines. They also want to educate students about how computers can be applied or used in various aspects of life.

"(It's important to) extract positive things from computer education," Evia said.

In the next few years, the LIKES project aims to incorporate its ideas into the curriculum for liberal education, make working with computers easier for various disciplines, and build community between undergraduate students and graduate students here at Tech and in universities around the country.