​Camilo Vieira, Ph.D.

News

 

2023 - Exciting Projects after the Pandemic

It has been a while since I posted updates about our work, but it does not mean that we have not been working hard. Here are some key updates to what has been happening since 2020:

• I am proud to say that we conducted the project evaluation for Coding for Kids from 2019 to 2022. This is a program that has impacted more than 20K teachers and one million students nationwide! Every year, I had the pleasure to work with an amazing team of students, professionals, and colleagues, to collect and analyze data on teacher and student learning, interactions in a community of practice, and the implementation of practices. Our findings and recommendations helped strengthening the program, which consistenly showed positive results on teacher and student learning. As of today, it is unclear whether the program will continue with the new national government, but I am hopeful that an important seed has been planted in the public schools of Colombia.

• Since 2021, me and my colleague Juan David Parra got involved in an international project led by University of Notre Dame and funded by USAID. We are contributing in two projects in Liberia and Honduras aimed at measuring students' socio-emotional skills and teacher well-being.

• In 2022, I received a Fulbright Visiting Scholarship to go and work for a semester at University of Virginia with my colleague Jennifer Chiu. Last March, we launched the Global Center for Equitative Access to Computing Education. We follow three  main strategies: (1) understanding students develop their computational thinking skills and what are contextual factors that influence their learning; (2) providing capacity-buiding opportunities for teachers and understanding how they learn and integrate these skills; and (3) designing accesible devices for public and underpriviledge schools to be able to integrate these practices. We are working with teachers and students from pre-K to high school, in urban and rural contexts, in the US and in Latin America. 

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2020 - Online CT Professional Development in Times of Pandemic

This year brought us new challenges for education, particularly with the COVID-19 pandemic, that made us all go online. The project Coding for Kids, where we participated in 2019 to prepare 300 teachers in Colombia to integrate computational thinking activities, also had to reinvent itself for 2020. The project went online and we are preparing now 8,500 teachers in all regions of Colombia. We participated in part of its design, and are now in charge of all the monitoring and evaluation process.  It is very exciting for us to contribute to improving the quality of Colombian education using evidence-based practices at such a large scale!

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Other important highlights of 2020:

• I have been working with my colleague from Eafit, Juan David Gomez (PhD), to integrate the cognitive apprenticeship model for the courses in computational mechanics from Civil Engineering. We presented last year at REES, and this year at FIE, and at a seminar on good practices from the Ministry of Education.

• We are working on professional development for discipline-based computational thinking at the K-12 level in collaboration with the Secretary of Education of Antioquia. One of my Ph.D. students, Alejandro Espinal, has led this program, with two cohorts already completed.

• We are creating a few learning materials for computational thinking education in Colombia. Thanks to my master's student Britny Velasquez.

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2019 - New home: Universidad del Norte

After one year of academic touring around Colombia, I just moved to Barranquilla to be part of an exciting team of educators in the IESE at Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia. 

 

Here, I will continue with my projects to integrate computing across disciplinary curricula at all educational levels, and to work with college faculty to integrate effective pedagogical practices into their classrooms. I will also work on new projects related to the pedagogical integration of technology (more info soon).

 

 

Summer Tour!

 

Since I came back to Colombia, I have been planning to bring my Phd adviser (Prof. Alejandra J Magana) and one of my committee members and great collaborator (Prof. Senay Purzer). We came up with a plan to do a seminar a three different universities, in three different cities. Universidad del Magdalena (Santa Marta), Universidad Nacional (Bogotá), and Universidad del Norte (Barranquilla) supported our initiative and we spent the week of July 23rd to July 27 2018 doing an #academictour on these citiies.

 

UniMagdalena and U. Nacional also wanted me to do additional workshops on Instructional Design and Educational Research for their faculty members. Here are some pictures and a video of this amazing experience! (more in the gallery)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Before...

I am back in Colombia!

Last December 2017, I finished my postdoctoral position at Purdue University and decided to come back to my home country to work on advancing education. The first activity that I did, was a 20-hour introductory workshop to educational research. The activities took place at Universidad Eafit, but we had participants from Parque Explora, Universidad de los Niños, and high school teachers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last summer (2017), I came back to Colombia with Juan David Ortega and Matilde Sanchez (two colleagues from Eng. Education at Purdue) to repeat the faculty development workshops. This time we did a whole tour on three different Colombian universities: Universidad Nacional de Colombia - Bogotá, Universidad EAFIT - Medellín, and Universida del Magdalena - Santa Marta.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We had a great time and some amazing discussions about instructional design with engineering faculty from these three important universities. I am very excited to see how motivated these faculty members are to improve their courses, and potentially starting doing educational research. Thanks to all the universities for making this instructional design tour 2017 poossible!.

 

Previously....

This last summer (2016) we went back again to Colombia with Charito and a couple of friends who are grad students here at Purdue. We designed two different workshops, one for high school and college students, and one for engineering faculty.

 

Charito, Alejo and I designed and taught a course on computational modeling to show students a different approach to science. The workshop involved the following topics: considerations in data collection (Alejo), modeling process (Charito), implementation of the model in R (myself).

 

Juan David and I designed and implemented a course on instructional design for engineering faculty at our alma mater: Eafit. Here are some pictures of both experiences:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, I ended up going back to Colombia last October. This time, I was sponsored by Clubes de Ciencia Colombia ( http://www.clubesdeciencia.co/ ) to work with high-school kids talking about engineering design. It was a great week in an amazing small town called San Francisco (Antioquia).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was in Colombia during May 2015 doing some workshops at University of Magdalena in Santa Marta, and at Ruta N in Medellin. It was a great experience to talk about engineering design with these diverse group of students. I look forward to do it again!

 

Take a look at a couple of short videos they prepared about the workshops and some pictures in the gallery