Broadening participation in computer science education requires teacher support and training, wherein we can co-construct expansive learning opportunities for youth. Computer science and data science education are expanding across K-12 classrooms in authentic and meaningful ways, which necessitates support for teachers and learners to engage technical, social, and conceptual challenges. Specifically, I explore a fifth grade computer science class, wherein youth learn about the data science process by collecting their own movement data through a variety of sports technologies. I investigate the interactions of both groups with data to identify techniques to increase learner engagement and address teacher concerns. For teachers, what scaffolds are needed for them to implement authentic and personal data interactions? For students, how does the context of the data and its personal relevance to them shape their learning about the data science process? Unique to this design are the computer science undergraduate student volunteers, who support the teaching and learning of the materials in classrooms. Volunteers mediate the technical and learning processes that allow for open-ended and contextualized data interactions in the classroom with new teachers. With a mix of survey, interview, and field note data, I analyze teacher and learner interactions across the 8 week unit. By studying this learning environment, we can identify strategies for teachers to engage in authentic data science education, and we can learn about youth's understanding of their choice and interpretation within their personal data interactions to shape the future of computer science and data science education.

In my dissertation, I investigate data interactions as processes and relationships that are situated in people's personal and experiential knowledge.I explore how youth express their agency, relationships, and perspectives of data within data interactions, such as during data generation, collection, transformation, visualization, and interpretation.Across multiple 5th grade computer science classrooms, I design a series of activities around sports and personal movement data that engage students in a series of data interactions that are personally situated in youth's embodied knowledge.Through the activities, youth interact with self-authored and embodied data.I combine survey analysis and qualitative coding to analyze pre-post surveys, field notes, and artifacts to investigate a range of data interactions.This work will support the design of data education futures that are grounded in agentic and authentic connections between learners' identities and their practices.

Ongoing calls for critical data literacy emphasize the importance of designing learning opportunities for youth to build relationships with data as its author and analyst.By generating and interpreting personal and embodied data, learners can develop relational lenses about data to support these types of skills.We apply actor network theory to analyze teen interactions in a summer program on sports technologies, where youth generate, visualize, and interpret their group's personal movement data.We examine youth's arguments about what data visualizations can depict through qualitative coding of their presentations.We notice youth relying on data as an actor within their arguments and mixing the data'a actions with their remembered experiences.As collaborative actors, youth and data engage in social sensemaking with the data.We offer this frame to highlight the plurality of participation across actors.This contributes to our understanding of community data science practices for teaching and learning.We offer this as an analytical lens for researchers and educators to pay attention to, in their designs and implementations of data literacy tools and activities.Specifically, how to notice and help learners explicate the multiple actors with diverse relationships engaged in making sense of data, and how engaging youth in group, embodied data activities enables unique personal and social ways of data interpretations.

In lieu of ongoing efforts to broaden participation in computing education, we explore a curriculum that integrates sports and computer science, aiming to engage students by drawing on their experiences in both domains. Through an in-school implementation with 5th-grade learners, we examine their engagement by analyzing their attitudes toward sports and computing. Using clustering analysis of student survey responses, we identify four distinct groups, each reflecting different motivations tied to the integration of sports. Our findings highlight how the curriculum's design provided varying levels of access to computer science for different groups of learners.

Here, we present findings from our research study conducted on a series of STEM workshops we developed and implemented in a local summer program for young Black boys. Data were collected and analyzed from surveys, student work, and field observations. Our preliminary findings suggest that youth began to acknowledge benefits in having both tech and sports within the same learning space. Specifically, they began to connect digital technologies with sports and consider them as mediating tools for acquiring and refining athletics skills.