Researchers and practitioners have worked to bring computer science to all students. However, CS is still an inequitable field. When developing curricula, we must account for the importance of connecting the lives and identities of historically marginalized students with instructional materials. We examine the knowledge and experiences that elementary (age 9-10) students drew upon to implement an open-ended programming assignment about themselves. We coded the Scratch projects of 189 students to investigate what aspects of their lives students reference, and how they use various modalities in Scratch to create digital media products about themselves. In our data, we found that the most common spheres portrayed were identity, hobbies and leisure, and interests. When expressing their identities, students narrated their experiences, expressed consciousness about their skills, connected to the user via their interests, and sometimes discussed equity. Additionally, our findings add to previous literature on Scratch as an effective platform for digital media production. In particular, we found that students used dialogue, images, sound, and the title to represent their spheres of influence through programming multimedia and interactive projects. This work has implications for the development of curricula and teaching guides for upper elementary students courses on computational thinking. Spheres of influence could inform researchers on the most influential aspects of students life in a specific context, providing elements for creating culturally relevant and interest-based materials and lessons.

The worldwide push for computing education at younger ages requires that teachers are prepared to deliver instruction that supports all learners. Other discipline-based education research fields offer a wealth of instructional scaffolds worthy of exploration in computing. One such scaffold drawn from math education is diagramming. While diagrams are frequently employed in university computing, little is known about its applications in K-8 (ages 6-14) computing.

Ensuring that computer science curricula connect to learners' home culture, interests, and lived experiences is one approach to making the field more equitable. A central feature of the Scratch Encore Curriculum is to provide many opportunities for learners to plan and implement open-ended programming projects that invite them to draw on their prior knowledge, experiences, and cultural resources. To date, relatively little research has been done to analyze how learners respond to such curricular invitations, specifically with respect to what aspects of themselves and their interests they choose to express in their resulting projects.

Open-ended tasks can be both beneficial and challenging to students learning to program. Such tasks allow students to be more creative and feel ownership over their work, but some students struggle with unstructured tasks and, without proper scaffolds, this can lead to negative learning experiences. Scratch is a widely used coding platform to teach computer science in classrooms and is designed to support learner creativity and expression. With its open-ended nature, Scratch can be used in various ways in the classroom to meet the needs of schools and districts. One challenge of using Scratch in classrooms is supporting learners in exploring their interests and fostering creativity while still meeting the instructional goals of a lesson and ensuring all students are engaged with, and understand, focal concepts and practices.

In 2020, the world confronted an unprecedented event affecting education globally: COVID-19. Events that disrupt education are not new; Homelessness or trauma negatively impact education at an individual level, whereas war stops education completely. This event is unique in that it caused the cessation of in-person instruction for all but with a rapid transition to remote instruction.

Given the increasing interest and need to teach students computer science in formal education settings, it is imperative to understand how to do so effectively and equitably. An important step of learning to program is being able to define the objective of a program and then plan out how to implement a program to produce the desired outcome. This step is particularly important in younger learners who may have little experience with programming or trying to create their own technological artifacts. In this paper, we explore how to scaffold young programmers in planning their open-ended programs as part of an intermediate Scratch curriculum for middle grade students. We analyze 203 paper and virtual planning documents from 103 5th-8th grade students. Our results reveal that the students often completed a majority of the document, which was consistent across grade levels. However, we found differences in student completion based on teacher and between physical and virtual documents. This work advances our understanding of how to support novice, young programmers in planning programs.

There is a need for more K-12 computer science (CS) teachers. The need to scale teacher professional development (PD) points the CS education community towards virtual learning, and prior work shows that in-person PD with a diffuse schedule is more successful than condensed schedules. There is currently little research about virtual K-12 CS PD with a diffuse schedule. The pandemic served as a forced opportunity to explore the design and implementation of a diffuse-scheduled virtual PD for two small, equally-sized cohorts of middle school (grades 5-8) teachers; one from a metropolitan school district and another from across the United States.

Given the importance of broadening participation in the field of computing, goals of supporting personal expression and developing a sense of belonging must live alongside the goals of conceptual knowledge and developing disciplinary expertise. Integrating opportunities for students to be creative in how they enact computing ideas plays an important role when designing curricula. We examine how student creativity, as expressed through theme and the use of costumes, backdrops, and narrative in Scratch projects, is affected by using a themed starter project. Starter projects are Scratch projects that include a set of sprites and backdrops aligned to a theme (e.g. baseball), but no code. Using within-group and between-group comparisons, we establish a baseline of what students do when they are given a starter project and explore how their projects differ in the absence of a starter project. This work contributes to our understanding of the impacts of structured elements within open-ended learning tasks and how we can design computer science learning experiences for students that promote opportunities for self-expression while engaging them in computing.

The computer science (CS) education field is exploring several instructional strategies for teaching CS to children in elementary school. Strong arguments have been made for integration--- constructing activities that not only teach CS, but use the CS to support learning in a core subject. Integrating CS materials into a specific curriculum is a non-trivial task that may unfairly burden elementary teachers, who are often generalists. Successful development and classroom implementation of integrated materials relies on many decisions about what, when, and how much subject matter to cover in relation to the main curriculum.

As computer science instruction gets offered to more young learners, transitioning from elective to requirement, it is important to explore the relationship between pedagogical approach and student behavior. While different pedagogical approaches have particular motivations and intended goals, little is known about to what degree they satisfy those goals.