Computing has been historically taught as neutral and devoid of any connection with societies. But more recently, technical tools are taking center stage at societal problem solving, influencing policies and practices around issues such as surveillance, privacy, and algorithmic bias. In this sociopolitical moment, people across different efforts within K-12 computing education are calling for integration of computing with social sciences to center implications of technologies on peoples, communities, and societies. There are multiple facets to these efforts: studying K-12 student engagement with critical content to preparing K-12 educators and ecosystems, developing pedagogical frameworks, and redesigning existing high school computing program to center justice. This panel will present a broad range of efforts towards critical introduction of computing within K-12 settings. While briefly introducing themselves and their work, each panelist will answer the questions: (a) How does your work and experiences address critical computing education? (b) What are some barriers that you have encountered? And (c) How have you addressed these concerns within your designs? Overall, the panel will open the space for discussing, highlighting, and learning from this set of diverse and synergetic critical computing efforts within K-12 computing education.

Learners in computing classrooms must develop and adopt viable conceptions of program dynamics to read, write, and debug programs within a given programming context. Learners find support in notional machines, or simplified notions about underlying program behavior within a programming context, that educators provide them. While prior studies have examined students’ use of notional machines to trace program execution during interviews or quizzes, learners’ interactions with them within classrooms is understudied. Framing learning with notional machines as a sociocultural process, I conducted an interaction analysis of high school students’ learning across eight class periods during a 14-week introductory computing electronic textiles online unit to answer the questions: (1) How did students interact with program dynamics during the unit? (2) Did notional machines support students with computing conceptual agency? If so, how? Findings revealed that learners interacted with program dynamics in agentic ways as they adopted notional machines to reason, ask questions about, reveal and revise their notions of program execution. While prior studies have explored notional machines’ affordance for mental model development, this study revealed their situated nature and their role in making program dynamics visible and accessible for sustained joint exploration within classrooms. Findings from this analysis make a three-fold contribution: they highlight the mediating role of notional machines in supporting agentic learner interaction with program dynamics, their role in sustaining joint meaning-making within computing classrooms, and their evolving nature as a result of continuous interactions between the learners and the teacher.

As one of the largest initiatives to introduce K-12 youth to computing, the Hour of Code has reached hundreds of millions of students around the globe. While Hour of Code activities have been immensely successful, they have also been criticized for their focus on puzzle-like close-ended guided activities leaving out more creative and critical engagement with computing. In this paper, we report on efforts to design CodeQuilt, an Hour-of-Code-style activity in which middle and high school youth were asked to design Scratch projects that engage with issues on who and what is computing. We analyzed over 100 Scratch projects posted on the public CodeQuilt site in addition to reflective responses provided by participating youth. We found that a wide array of Scratch projects engaged creatively by integrating popular media but only a small number of projects focused on critical issues. In the discussion, we outline next steps for better supporting more critical and creative engagement with computing in Hour of Code activities.

Notional machines i.e. pedagogical devices to communicate program execution play a key role in computing classrooms, especially within introductory settings [2, 5]. From machine-generated representations to classroom learning activities, a variety of notional machines have been examined in the field of computing education research. A more recent review [2] has also noted the adoption of multiple notional machines by instructors during a course or a unit to communicate a family of interconnected, computing concepts within a learning context.

Comprehending programs is key to learning programming. Previous studies highlight novices' naive approaches to comprehending the structural, functional, and behavioral aspects of programs. And yet, with the majority of them examining on-screen programming environments, we barely know about program comprehension within physical computing-a common K-12 programming context. In this study, we qualitatively analyzed think-aloud interview videos of 22 high school students individually comprehending a given text-based Arduino program while interacting with its corresponding functional physical artifact to answer two questions: 1) How do novices comprehend the given text-based Arduino program? And, 2) What role does the physical artifact play in program comprehension? We found that novices mostly approached the program bottom-up, initially comprehending structural and later functional aspects, along different granularities. The artifact provided two distinct modes of engagement, active and interactive, that supported the program's structural and functional comprehension. However, behavioral comprehension i.e. understanding program execution leading to the observed outcome was inaccessible to many. Our findings extend program comprehension literature in two ways: (a) it provides one of the very few accounts of high school students' code comprehension in a physical computing context, and, (b) it highlights the mediating role of physical artifacts in program comprehension. Further, they point directions for future pedagogical and tool designs within physical computing to better support students' distributed program comprehension.

Systems of power - such as structural racism, a system that upholds the ideology of white supremacy - are invisible and permeate our everyday lives and un/intentionally into our research. As these systems influence what counts as 'successful' work, CSEd researchers often have to assimilate ('whiten') themselves and their work into dominant ideals that uphold these structures. This workshop brings together aspiring and early-career CSEd researchers to critically examine and unpack the impacts of systems of power on ourselves and our research practices. Such examination is necessary to strive towards a critical consciousness in the field. We investigate critical questions like the following: What are systems of power? Who has the right to participate? Who has the right to exclude? We will use group-based activities that center historicities and 'outsider' knowledge to examine CSEd research practices and theories to answer these questions. We will draft a set of guidelines and recommendations available to the broader CSEd research community from the discussions and activities.

In my dissertation study, I examine teaching and learning through the use of notional machines-pedagogical approaches to communicate runtime behavior of programs-in the context of high school students programming electronic textiles physical computing artifacts. My focus will be on: (1) teachers' notional machines, (2) development of students' understanding of programs and programmed systems, and (3) the relationship between teachers' notional machines and student understanding. This study will contribute to our understanding of how to support the diverse K-12 student population to better understand abstract computing concepts within physical computing classrooms.

Electronic textiles, which integrate computation with fabrics through a redesigned interface of microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators, have expanded possibilities not only for engineering, fashion, and human-computer interaction but also for computer science education itself. While individual studies involving electronic textiles have shown promise to diversify participation, raise interest, and deepen learning in computing, especially for female students, we recognized a need to synthesize findings across studies to understand the overall contribution of electronic textiles to computing education. In this article, we report our findings from a meta-synthesis of 64 educational electronic textiles studies to answer the following questions in computing: (1) Did electronic textiles broaden access and participation? (2) How did electronic textiles support learners’ interests and sustain participation? (3) What and how did students learn from electronic textile projects? Our meta-synthesis revealed that although electronic textiles successfully broadened access, supported learners’ interests, and introduced basic computational concepts to novice learners, questions around equitable participation and deeper disciplinary engagement persist. We discuss directions for future design and research efforts to explore the full potential of e-textiles in computer science education.

Just over a decade ago, various electronic textile construction kits have emerged with Arduino-based microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators that can be sewn together with conductive thread to create wearables augmented with new functionalities. These kits were designed to broaden participation in and perspectives about computing along with introducing learners to powerful ideas about circuitry and coding. In this paper, we synthesize 46 studies that have introduced crafts, circuitry, and coding concepts with e-textiles in K-16 education. We found that e-textiles have been successful in broadening participation and increasing interest in computing for many youth and adults, especially from underrepresented groups, inside and outside of school. While the e-textiles construction kits have been successful in deepening learning of circuitry concepts, learning of computer science, especially advanced concepts, has been far less attended to with the exception of projects designed by undergraduate students with already significant disciplinary expertise. In the discussion, we suggest directions for future research such as bringing more computing into e-textile designs, creating assessments to capture coding and circuitry learning, and developing models for more advanced projects to leverage the potential of e-textiles for computer science education.

The links between music and computation date back at least three decades. This trend has led to the development of learning environments for novices to make music and learn computational concepts. However, research connecting music and computation is mostly situated within the context of on-screen programming, with little research involving hybrid, tangible environments. Electronic textiles (e-textiles) is one such hybrid context where learners craft interactive physical artifacts by sewing microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators onto toys, clothes, or other fabric accessories. Prior studies show that Arduino-based e-textiles afford opportunities for students to learn basic concepts such as variables and control flow but not more advanced concepts such as arrays and for loops. In our study, we expand learning with e-textiles as learners compose and code music to address the following research question: What are the affordances of designing musical wearables to deepen computational conceptual learning? We present a case study of a group of four 15-17-year-old youth and an adult co-making a musical wearable-JazzHands-a glove augmented with actuators such as LEDs and speaker, and motion, touch, and light sensors. We analyzed videos of the group's collaborative design sessions, student daily journals, multiple versions of the code, and post-workshop, artifact-based interviews with the youth. Our analysis revealed that making musical wearables not only allowed the youth to express themselves and relate to computing as a creative endeavor but also afforded unique opportunities to work with constructs such as arrays indices, sensor data integration, and logical expressions to control for loops.

Many efforts of curricula design have concentrated on expanding participation in K-12 CS education by introducing innovative approaches but few have focused on addressing longstanding equity issues through their choices of culturally relevant materials and activities. In this paper, we describe our efforts in using electronic textiles which include Arduino-based microcontrollers that are sewn with conductive thread on fabrics to connect actuators and sensors and create interactive wearables. We report on the implementation of an electronic textiles curricular unit in the Exploring Computer Science introductory computing course in 13 high schools involving 272 high school students largely from underrepresented groups in a major metropolitan school district. We examined two issues relevant to broadening equitable participation in CS: (1) students' changed perceptions of computing, and (2) students' depth of learning of computing, circuitry and crafting in the final project. Pre/post surveys on students' perceptions of computing showed positive, significant gains in students' self-confidence in solving CS problems, fascination with computing and ability to be creative with computing. Teacher evaluations of students' final projects revealed robust learning in the areas of basic programming and computational circuitry as well as strong learning across more challenging computational concepts, with room for growth. We discuss factors that impacted student outcomes and outline steps for further analysis.