“Could you write that on the board, please?” Dr. Benjamin Sanders looked up from his laptop. He seemed a bit jolted by the question. “Oh… yeah,” he replied, then got up and wrote the formula on the whiteboard behind him.
It was a simple enough request, and he didn’t seem upset, but it was clearly a change to his standard workflow.
Dr. Sanders is facilitating a coding camp at California Baptist University’s School of Engineering, attended by ten deaf high school students from California School for the Deaf Riverside. This is the pilot event in what is intended to be a long-term relationship between CBU and CSDR.
Over 150,000 deaf people live in the Inland Empire. CSDR has recently drawn attention with the success of its Varsity Football team, but deaf culture is not a newcomer to Riverside. Since the opening of CSDR in 1953, Riverside has been a major academic and cultural hub for deaf people in Southern California and across the country.
Dr. Phil Van Haaster, Dean of CBU’s College of Engineering, says he saw an opportunity for deaf people in STEAM-related professions and wanted to connect with CSDR at an institutional level to provide an introduction to deaf high school students to what an education and eventual career in STEAM might look like. CBU also offers American Sign Language (ASL) as a minor, so there is a supplemental infrastructure that helps facilitate institutional cooperation.
This camp was focused on coding. The students were creating a simple “Snake” type game. It was encouraging to see how slight modifications in teaching methodologies and an ASL interpreter could bridge most communication gaps between the students and the professor. I was observing the early stages of this collaboration. Still, I would love to go back and see how content delivery changes as the parties become more familiar and more adaptive tools and procedures are adopted as needs arise. There is promise in this collaboration, and it is exciting to see Riverside at the center.
