The Mark Cuban Foundation AI Bootcamp has formed a strategic partnership with the Institute for Advancing Computing Education (IACE) to enhance the evaluation and assessment of our programming. This collaboration brings together the Foundation’s mission of making AI education accessible to underserved high school students with IACE’s expertise in evidence-based computing education research.
Through this partnership, IACE provides critical research and evaluation support to help us understand the impact of our bootcamps and improve our programming over time. The collaboration ensures that our AI education initiatives are grounded in rigorous research methodologies and validated assessment tools that can accurately measure student learning outcomes and engagement.
The Institute for Advancing Computing Education (IACE) is a nonprofit research organization working to ensure that every child—regardless of background—has access to meaningful, high-quality computer science learning opportunities.
IACE partners with educators, researchers, and organizations nationwide to develop and promote evidence-based strategies for PreK–20+ computer science education. Our work includes all students and this means we also ensure that we include students who have been historically left out of technology fields: girls, students from rural areas, children from lower-income communities, students with disabilities, and underrepresented groups.
Through research and collaboration, IACE provides actionable insights, resources, and tools that help schools and programs broaden participation in computing and prepare the next generation of problem-solvers and creators.
IACE provides comprehensive research and evaluation support for the Mark Cuban Foundation AI Bootcamp through multiple avenues of collaboration. The team’s primary contributions focus on strengthening our ability to measure and understand the impact of our programming on participating students.
One of the most significant ways IACE supports our bootcamp is through their review and recommendations for our student survey instruments. The team examines our draft surveys that are deployed both before and after each bootcamp session, providing expert feedback to ensure these tools effectively capture meaningful data about student experiences and learning outcomes.
IACE also shares its extensive repository of current and validated assessment instruments related to key areas such as student interest in computing, sense of belonging in STEM fields, and computational thinking skills. This resource sharing helps us leverage proven measurement tools rather than developing new instruments from scratch, ensuring our evaluation methods are both rigorous and efficient.
IACE’s contributions to the Mark Cuban Foundation AI Bootcamp center on several critical areas that enhance our program’s effectiveness and impact measurement. Their expertise in computing education research provides us with access to validated survey instruments that measure student interest, confidence, and sense of belonging in computing fields.
The organization’s extensive knowledge of assessment tools for computational thinking proves particularly valuable for our AI-focused programming. IACE helps us understand how to effectively measure whether students are developing the problem-solving skills and computational mindset that are central to understanding artificial intelligence concepts.
Additionally, IACE’s experience with equity-focused research aligns perfectly with our bootcamp’s mission to serve underserved students. Their research on inclusive computing education practices helps inform our approach to creating welcoming environments for students from diverse backgrounds.
The partnership also benefits from IACE’s strategic approach to implementing assessment tools with student populations as they transition into alumni networks. This long-term perspective helps us understand not just immediate bootcamp impacts, but also how students’ attitudes and engagement with computing evolve.
This collaboration represents a powerful alignment between practice and research that strengthens both organizations’ ability to advance computing education for underserved students. The Mark Cuban Foundation AI Bootcamp benefits from IACE’s rigorous research methodology and extensive knowledge of validated assessment tools, while IACE gains valuable insights from working with a large-scale, real-world educational initiative.
The partnership is important because it ensures our bootcamp programming is grounded in evidence-based practices rather than assumptions about what works. Through IACE’s expertise, we can measure not just whether students enjoy our bootcamps, but whether they are developing genuine interest in computing fields, feeling a sense of belonging in STEM environments, and building the computational thinking skills that will serve them in future educational and career pursuits.
This collaboration also contributes to the broader field of computing education research by providing IACE with data and insights from a diverse, national network of AI education programs. The partnership helps advance understanding of how to effectively introduce AI concepts to high school students and how to measure the impact of such interventions across different communities and contexts.
Click here to learn more about IACE and its mission.
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