Who We Are

The Connected Learner Project at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte is a re-orientation of undergraduate computing education to focus on student learning that connects to peers, the profession, and the community. 

Awardee: NSF – EEC
Div Of Engineering Education and Centers
Start Date: June 1, 2015
Amount Awarded: $2,250,648.00
Investigator(s):

Mary Lou Maher (Principal Investigator)
Bojan Cukic (Co-Principal Investigator)
Steven Rogelberg (Co-Principal Investigator)
Larry Mays (Co-Principal Investigator)
Celine Latulipe (Co-Principal Investigator)
Audrey Rorrer (Co-Principal Investigator)


We envision to transform… 

  1. Student entering an undergraduate computing and informatics program from a person with an interest in computing – to a person with an identity as a computing professional.
  2. Faculty attitude towards education, shifting their attitudes away from knowledge transmission toward a refreshed approach of developing educational activities that scaffold the computing knowledge and skills to build successful computing professionals.

Our broader impacts fall into three categories:

  1. Broadening the reach of computing education to a diverse student population (first time college students, ethnic diversity, GPA diversity)
  2. Creating partnerships and building a computing community with high schools and other partners in STARSComputingCorps.org
  3. Preparing future IT leaders for the region and the country (including: data science, cyber security, visual analytics, and human centered design).