Dr. Abdu Arslanyilmaz is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at YSU. He is originally from Turkey. Dr. Arslanyilmaz received his bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Missouri, and received his PhD at Texas A&M University. After completing his PhD, Dr. Arslanyilmaz came to YSU and has been teaching here for 6 years. These are some the courses he has taught CSIS 3760: E-Commerce Programming, CSIS 2620: System Configuration & Maintenance, CSIS 1570: Web Systems & Technologies, and INFO 5875: Advance Multimedia Authoring.

Since the award was announced by NSF, Dr. Arslanyilmaz and other researchers have been focusing on planning the project. So far, they have received IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval, designed/defined analysis instruments, recruited teachers to work with them, and formed a collaborative management team

This project will a) design and develop an accessible computing curriculum for students with Autism Spectrum Disorders, b) implement the computing curriculum(s) at local middle school(s), and c) evaluate the effectiveness of the accessible curriculum. The project will also provide a publicly accessible computing curricular and professional development resource. This is the first study in the literature to design, develop, implement an accessible computing curriculum for students with ASD, and test and report its effectiveness.

Currently, the project is planned for two years, involving a computing curriculum for 7th grade students with Autism. After this initial phase, Dr. Arslanyilmaz intends to expand it to other grade levels for design, implementation, and testing. He anticipates that the second phase will take about three years.

You can read more about Dr. Arslanyilmaz's research by clicking here and here.