Afterschool centers present a valuable opportunity to broaden access to Computer Science (CS) education in the United States (US). To address the shortage of CS instructors in afterschool programs, prior work has shown that volunteers and K-12 teachers from other disciplines can be trained to teach foundational CS topics, such as block programming. However, supporting these educators to teach specialized content, such as Robotics, requires further investigation into the training strategies and pedagogical scaffolding required for them to provide high-quality instruction. To address this gap, we present a case study of one afterschool instructor, a kindergarten teacher, whom we trained to teach virtual and physical robotics to fourth and fifth grade students. This study highlights the different levels of instructional support that such teachers need across virtual and physical curricula, and provides strategies that can support teachers without formal CS knowledge to teach robotics.

Students' perceptions of AI are often shaped by commercialized and fictional depictions of AI, leading to misuse, underuse, and over-reliance on AI tools. Such preconceptions place additional burdens on K-12 AI curricula to not only educate students on foundational AI knowledge components, but also uncover and reshape students' understanding of AI. To understand ways to uncover and address students' AI misconceptions in formal learning settings, we conducted a study that taught foundational AI concepts using a formal AI curriculum, games, interactive activities, and scenario-based challenges to high school girls. We analyzed student dialog and survey responses data to observe shifts in their perceptions and understanding of AI. Our findings indicate that unstructured AI activities effectively scaffold student reflection and metacognition on AI topics, contributing to significant shifts in perception. This work provides insights for designing engaging and effective AI curricula that address students' misunderstandings of AI.

The increased demand for Computer Science (CS) skills across most professions has necessitated providing CS training for post-secondary learners regardless of their fields of study. This is especially true in developing countries with high unemployment rates, where workers need to update their skills continuously to remain employable. Understanding the motivations of students who enroll in CS courses with limited prior training is critical for designing learning environments that help them achieve their desired goals. This paper studied the motivations of 2376 African students and working professionals enrolled in a smartphone-based programming MOOC. We found that the non-CS major participants wanted to learn programming to develop business applications, keep up with the demand for computing skills in their careers, and produce tools that positively impact their community. We also found that factors such as employment status and participants' motivations influenced students' persistence through the course. Our research contributes valuable insights for accessible and effective programming MOOC design for African professionals, especially for those without CS backgrounds.

Computer science education in Africa is gaining momentum as computer science skills give employees a competitive advantage in an increasingly globalized labor market. Researchers and educators have addressed this demand by making CS instructional materials more accessible, creating professional development (PD) resources, and designing online courses targeted at undergraduate CS education settings. However, there is limited research on what types of support African teachers need to improve pedagogy in K-12 settings, which is critical for fostering foundational interest in CS. To address this, we interviewed fourteen CS teachers in nine K-12 schools in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana to uncover opportunities to design interventions that address challenges they experience with teaching CS in schools and support their professional development. We found that most CS teachers lack formal CS training and therefore taught students self-taught topics from their personal education or work experiences, regardless of the requirements of the government curriculum. We also found that CS teachers are by default assigned computer-based school administration responsibilities, such as grade administration and managing school websites, further limiting time for professional development. We propose solutions for creating professional development tools considering these teachers' CS experience, limited computing resources, professional development time, and curriculum requirements.

Computing ethics instruction is a vital aspect of the undergraduate computing curriculum. It has received greater focus in recent years driven in part by concerns about the societal impacts of computing technologies such as social media and artificial intelligence. The increased attention provides an opportunity, even an imperative, to examine and rethink common practices. To support our understanding of current practices in computing ethics education, we surveyed 318 computing educators in the United States (U.S.), including 56 who have never taught ethics. The survey included questions about ethics teaching methods and challenges the instructors confronted. We show that ethical frameworks are frequently taught yet teaching them is regarded as one of the least important learning outcomes, and that respondents largely do not consider author demographics when selecting readings for their ethics classes, which could limit the diversity in perspectives present in the course. We conclude with recommendations for improving teaching methods, materials selection, and deployment strategies in computing ethics education, and discuss their implications for promoting more inclusive computing ethics education curricula in the U.S.

Despite the best intentions to support equity with educational technologies, they often lead to a “rich get richer” effect, in which communities of more advantaged learners gain greater benefit from these solutions. Effective design of these technologies necessitates a deeper understanding of learners in understudied contexts and their motivations to pursue an education. Consequently, we studied a 15-week remote course launched in 2021 with 17,896 learners that provided engineering education through a radio and phone-based system aimed for use in rural settings within Northern Uganda. We address shifts in learners’ motivations for course participation and investigate the impact of demographic features and motivations of students on persistence and performance. We found significant increases in student motivation to learn more about and pursue STEM. Importantly, the course was most successful for learners in demographics who typically experience fewer educational opportunities, showing promise for such technologies to close opportunity gaps.

Computing Ethics (CE) courses are an increasingly important component of the undergraduate computing curriculum because of the outsized influence of computing on society. CE encompasses topics from multiple disciplines including the humanities; however, it is typically taught by educators within a Computer Science (CS) department in most undergraduate institutions in the United States, potentially leading to a less than comprehensive CE education for students. We surveyed 318 computing educators in US higher education to investigate CS educators' perceptions of how CE topics should ideally be taught. Most of our respondents thought that CE should be taught by a multidisciplinary team of instructors, and further that it should be taught both as a standalone course and embedded in other courses. Our research provides insights into ways to improve CE education that result in a better student experience.

Computing ethics courses are generally considered essential in undergraduate programs, but there is limited research on the importance of their inclusion at the master's level. In this study, we extend research conducted by Dexter et al. in 2013 about the importance of ethics in master's programs. We surveyed Associate Chairs and Associate Deans of Graduate Studies representing 81 different computing programs in the United States. 72% of respondents shared that ethics should be required in master's computing programs. In contrast, only 46% of the 81 programs surveyed require any type of ethics course at the master's level. Our findings also uncover barriers to the inclusion of ethics at the master's level and propose strategies for alleviating these challenges.

Afterschool programs routinely provide or supplement Computer Science (CS) education to K-12 students in the United States. However, such opportunities are rarely available to students from low-income communities due to limited computing resources and CS instructors. One strategy for increasing access to instructors in such settings is to train afterschool staff to teach CS to students in their programs. To investigate the viability of this approach, we recruited and trained three afterschool staff with little prior computing experience to teach their students block programming. We analyzed data from teaching observations and survey-based teaching reflections to understand high-level challenges to this strategy. We found that instructors internalized students' successes and failures as reflections of their own CS teaching ability, and they sometimes struggled to adapt the structured teaching materials to the informal nature of afterschool programs. We reflect on the consequences of these insights and suggest strategies to increase access to CS instructors in low-income afterschool settings.

With the growing prevalence of AI, the need for K-12 AI education is becoming more crucial, which is prompting active research in developing engaging AI learning activities. In this paper, we present our work on a game construction toolkit for middle school students and educators that enables them to tailor an AI-focused unplugged card game activity. In our prior work, we designed, developed, and piloted an unplugged card game activity where players predict the identity of a person based on hand-drawn features extracted from a set of facial cards. The activity aims to teach AI concepts aligned with one of the big ideas in AI utilizing techniques from facial recognition. During our pilot testing of the activity, we discovered that creating face cards that capture students' interest is a crucial factor in promoting student engagement. As a result, we designed a card game construction toolkit that allows students and educators to craft their own face card decks using photos that are personally interesting to them, looking to foster engagement and improve replayability of the activity. The toolkit's design is focused on ensuring easy accessibility and features a simple web-based interface that allows users to download and print their customized cards. We expect this toolkit will enhance the usability and educational effectiveness of our unplugged K-12 AI education activity.

The importance of considering local context and partnering with target users is well established in co-design. Less common is an examination of the adaptations needed when deploying the same co-design program across heterogenous settings to maximize program efficacy and equity. We report on our experience co-designing educational games with six culturally and socioeconomically diverse afterschool sites over two years, and insights from interviewing ten program administrators across all sites. We found that even within the same afterschool program network, site differences in organizational culture and resources impacted the effectiveness of co-design programs, the co-design output, and expectations for student engagement. We characterize our afterschool partners into different archetypes – Safe Havens, Recreation Centers, Homework Helpers, and STEM Enrichment Centers. We provide recommendations for conducting co-design at each archetype and reflect on strategies for increasing equitable partnerships between researchers and afterschool centers.

Over the past year, our AI4GA team of university faculty and middle school teachers have co-designed a middle school AI curriculum. In this poster we share how we used co-design both as a tool for collaboratively developing engaging AI activities and as a mechanism for mutual professional development. We explain our co-design process, give examples of curriculum materials provided to teachers, and showcase several teacher-created activities. We believe this approach to curriculum development centers the lived experiences of teachers and leverages the knowledge and expertise of university researchers to create high quality and engaging AI learning experiences for K-12 students.

The AI4GA project is developing a nine-week elective course called Living and Working with Artificial Intelligence and piloting it in several Georgia middle schools. Since we aspire to educate all students about AI, the course addresses a wide range of student abilities, levels of academic preparedness, and prior computing experience, and leaves room for teachers to adapt the material to their own students' needs and interests. The course content is primarily focused on unplugged activities and online demonstration programs. We also provide small programming projects using AI tools as an option for teachers to incorporate. In this poster we describe lessons learned from initial pilot offerings by five teachers who taught 12 sections of the course totaling 299 students. We present evidence that middle school students can successfully engage with substantive technical content about Artificial Intelligence.

Creating technology products using codesign techniques often results in higher end-user engagement compared to expert-driven designs. Codesign sessions are typically structured in flexible and informal ways to achieve equal design partnerships, especially in adult-child interactions. This generally leads to better design output, however, it may also increase the enactment of socially constructed stereotypes and biases in ways that negatively affect the experiences of racial minorities and girls/women in design spaces. We codesigned a video game with a K-5 afterschool program located in a working-class, rural, predominantly white county over 20 weeks. We uncover ways that the codesign process and different activity types can create a permissive environment for enacting behaviors that are harmful to minorities. We discuss ways to manage and restructure codesign programs to be more conducive for children and adults from diverse backgrounds, ultimately leading to healthier design partnerships.

Adaptive Collaborative Learning Support (ACLS) systems improve collaboration and learning for students over individual work or collaboration with non-adaptive support. However, many ACLS systems are ill-suited for rural contexts where students often need multiple kinds of support to complete tasks, may speak languages unsupported by the system, and require more than pre-assigned tutor-tutee student pairs for more equitable learning. We designed an intervention that fosters more equitable help-seeking by automatically detecting student struggles and prompts them to seek help from specific peers that can help. We conducted a mixed-methods experimental study with 98 K-3 students in a rural village in Tanzania over a one-month period, evaluating how the system affects student interactions, system engagement, and student learning. Our intervention increased student interactions by almost 4 times compared to the control condition, increased domain knowledge interactions, and propelled students to engage in more cognitively challenging activities.

Teachers’ perspectives are critical for understanding classroom culture. They create and enforce rules in classrooms and are responsible for educating students using methods that they perceive to be most effective. Therefore, creating supplementary education technologies without understanding teachers and the culture they promote may lead to interventions that are underutilized or ineffective. Our research specifically investigates how technologies that foster student collaboration fit into teachers’ views of learning in a rural context with limited existing collaboration scaffolds. We interviewed 24 teachers and observed 39 classrooms in a rural Tanzanian village to understand how teachers value peer-peer collaboration in their teaching practice, and the unique challenges they face educating students in rural classroom settings. We uncover insights that inform the design and deployment of supplementary education technologies to support teachers in rural Tanzania and similar demographics.

Tablet-based educational technologies provide a supplement to traditional classroom-based early literacy education, especially in regions with limited schooling resources. Prior work has probed how children generally interact with and learn from these technologies, however, there is limited research on student engagement with applications that utilize valuable input techniques such as automatic handwriting and speech recognition. In our study, we designed and field-tested early literacy speech and handwriting recognition applications with the primary aim of maximizing student engagement. We designed the applications based on prior research insights and classroom observations from our target population and field-tested the applications with 283 children living in rural Tanzania. We found that observing a small set of classrooms can produce design insights that increase engagement on tablet-based learning systems on a much larger scale. We also demonstrate the importance of domain familiarity in students' choice to persist through activities while learning with technology.

Smartphone- and tablet-based learning systems are often posited as solutions for closing early literacy gaps between rural and urban regions in emerging economies. These systems are often developed based on experiences with students in urban contexts, limiting their success rates with children from rural areas who have had little to no prior exposure to technology. To explore how such technologies are used in different learning contexts, we deployed an early literacy learning application in school and home settings in a rural village in Tanzania. We use Rogoff's theory of instructional models to understand and describe the interaction between learners, adults, and peers. We found that in the presence of a school teacher, the instructional model was primarily "adult-run" where information was almost entirely disseminated by the teacher, while in home settings, the instructional model was similar to a "community-of-learners" model where children collaborate with other peers and adults to achieve their learning goals. We use these instructional models to surface six themes of support and scaffolding that were expressed differently across settings, and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the instructional models observed in providing support across these themes.

Making MOOCs accessible to English Language Learners (ELLs) requires that students understand the language of instruction, and that instructional strategies address their unique learning challenges. Through the analysis of clickstream log data gathered from two MOOC courses deployed on Coursera, Introduction to Psychology and Statistical Thermodynamics, we show that ELL students exhibit distinct struggle behaviors in video portions without visual aids e.g., narrations without slides. Our findings challenge widely accepted multimedia design principles such as the split attention effect, provide insights into designing MOOC videos, and emphasize the need for adaptivity to increase MOOC access for ELLs.

Partnering with parents and children in the design process can be important for producing technologies that take into consideration the rich context of family life. However, to date, few studies have examined the actual process of designing with families and their children. Without understanding the process, we risk making poor design choices in user-interactive experiences that take into account important family dynamics. The purpose of this investigation is to understand how parent-child relationships in families shape co-design processes and how they are reshaped through co-design. We document the evolutionary process and outcomes that exist in co-design partnerships between researchers and families. We found that parents' engagement patterns shifted more slowly than that of children's from observing and facilitating to design partnering practices. Our analysis suggests the importance of establishing and nurturing social bonds among parents, children, and researchers in the co-design process.

Open access and low cost make Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) an attractive learning platform for students all over the world. However, the majority of MOOCs are deployed in English, which can pose an accessibility problem for students with English as a Second Language (ESL). In order to design appropriate interventions for ESL speakers, it is important to correctly identify these students using a method that is scalable to the high number of MOOC enrollees. Our findings suggest that a new metric, browser language preference, may be better than the commonly-used IP address for inferring whether or not a student is ESL.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to bridge education and literacy gaps by offering high quality, free courses to anyone with an Internet connection. MOOCs in their present state, however, may be relatively inaccessible to non-native English speakers, as a majority of MOOC content is in the English language. While a potential solution is to translate all MOOC content into all languages, it is not known whether this solution will satisfy the learning goals of all English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers. Through a series of interviews, we investigate ESL speakers' motivations for taking MOOCs and other online courses. Our findings show that ESL speakers have a variety of motivations for taking online courses that are not captured in current surveys, which implies that current one-size-fits-all approaches to increasing MOOC accessibility for learners with a first language other than English may not be effective. Rather, offering learners individualized tools based on their motivation and needs may be more effective.