Designing for Inclusive Computer Science Education and Beyond

Inclusion is becoming one of those words that people feel like they are supposed to use, but seldom realize the depth of what it can mean for their work. Over the past several years I have been exploring various ways that we can improve inclusivity within Computer Science. In this talk I will highlight ways that my students and I operationalize inclusivity across my lab’s different research projects. This primarily includes ways that we design inclusive computer science learning experiences and subsequently create new technologies to facilitate participation and assess learning. The talk will mention several of my ongoing projects but narrow in on SportSense. SportSense is an NSF sponsored initiative that integrates sports and computer science across a variety of learning contexts. Some of these contexts include elementary coding classes, 6th-8th grade after school programs, high school sports team practices, summer camps, and university courses. These connection points to everyday settings that extend outside of traditional computer science spaces is part of what I mean in thinking about the 'beyond.' The SportSense project includes partnerships with several major corporations and has enabled more than 3000 youth to expand their interest and awareness of computer science. Additionally, the different implementations have translated into new sports technology ideas and a collection of new interfaces for youth to program sports wearables. The talk will highlight some of these developments and present plans for future work which leverages multimodal data to more closely assess participant learning of computing concepts.