The Reflective Mentor: Charting Undergraduatesʼ Responses to Computer Science Service Learning Quinn Burke, Yasmin B. Kafai, Jean Griffin*, Rita M. Powell*, Michele Grab*, & Susan B. Davidson* University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education *Department of Computer and Information Science 3700 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19106 burkew@dolphin.upenn.edu, kafai@upenn.edu, griffin@seas.upenn.edu, rpowell@seas.upenn.edu, mgrab@seas.upenn.edu, susan@cis.upenn.edu ABSTRACT Community service are often the courses in which undergraduates make connections between academic content and practical computer science applications, build bridges between the university and the surrounding community, and ultimately increase access to technology within these communities. In this poster we report on our efforts to design, implement, and evaluate a service-learning course based on a “cascading mentoring” model linking together the faculty, administration, and undergraduates of an urban university’s computer science department with area high school students. The poster presents the cascading model and through a series of post-interviews offers preliminary data charting undergraduates’ experiences as both mentees and mentors. ACM Classification Keywords K.3.0 [Computers and Education]: General General Terms Human Factors Keywords Community service, mentoring programming SIGNIFICANCE It is argued (Vogelsang & Astin, 2000) that community service courses are where undergraduates make connections between academic content and practical computer science applications, build bridges between the university and the surrounding community, and ultimately increase access to technology within these communities. Despite years of interventions aimed at broadening participation in computer science, research (Carter, 2006) continues to report barriers to participation for entire populations of our citizenry. Increasingly there is the recognition among CS educators of the need to introduce computer science to students on the K-12 level and utilize innovative interventions, such as service based learning courses, to bridge undergraduate CS programs with high school curricula (Sanderson, 2003). Based upon our earlier study (Kafai et al., 2008) documenting mentoring partnerships between university undergraduates and underserved youth, this study further explores the potential to heighten the mentor-mentee relationship by ensuring it is of a reciprocal nature. Recent research on the potential of service learning courses to address social and academic inequities posits that their effectiveness is closely tied to the extent that the mentor-mentee relationships is a complementary one (Hart, 2006). Accordingly, whereas our previous study focused solely on undergraduates in the role of mentors, our current research presents a “cascading” mentoring model in which experienced high school students and college undergraduates actually transition from the role of mentees to mentors over a series of service learning workshops. Here we report on a preliminary analysis of the model through a series of post-interviews with the undergraduate and high school mentors. Since the development of such types of service learning has not been prominent in CS departments, our research provides early documentation of how reciprocal and cascading models of mentoring can be implemented at the undergraduate level. CASCADING MENTORING Based upon a three-year “Broadening Participation in Computing” grant sponsored by the National Science Foundation, our cascading mentoring model was developed through a partnership between the university’s computer science and educations departments whose faculty designed and instructed a service learning course for CS undergraduates. In terms of enrollment, we recruited high school participants largely under-represented in CS—over 75% of the undergraduate mentors and 60% high school participants were of a racial minority status, while 3 out of 11 mentors and 11 out of 26 high school participants were female. A total of 11 computer science undergraduates participated in the two service learning courses during second year of grant. All participants—undergraduate and highs school—produced a series of programmable projects that utilized a wide range of CS- based concepts, which were demo-ed over the final day of each class and camp. Over the initial third of each service-learning course, undergraduates designed their own projects in the various applications such as Scratch, Python or Lilypad Arduino. Undertaking the role of mentee, they learned about each application and then presented their ongoing projects to university faculty as well as to classroom peers to receive constructive feedback and reflect upon the learning process. For the remaining two-thirds of each course, undergraduates then focused their