Who gets to decide how generative AI tools enter students’ classrooms? We report on a five-week participatory design program in which three 11th-grade Latinx students and three high school teachers in California negotiated how generative AI tools would be used and taught about in learning environments. Drawing on video recordings and designed artifacts, we ask: what critical AI literacy practices emerged as students and teachers jointly designed how generative AI tools would be used and taught about? Our analysis reveals three practices: collectively unsettling assumptions about AI, mutual learning through complementary expertise, and grounding AI critique in cultural knowledge and creative practice. Students and teachers developed these practices through the design work itself. This case contributes strategies for designing with youth around an emergent technology like generative AI toward critical AI literacy. It extends work on youth as protagonists by showing how this approach enables students to shape both the adoption and the interrogation of these tools in their learning environments.

The Latinx community is underrepresented in tech-oriented fields, which aligns with the lack of culturally relevant learning experiences in CS for Latinx youth, hindering their ability to conceptualize technology as a tool for transformation and vehicle for cultural expression. This study takes on a restorying approach at the elementary level, where 9 fourth-grade students engaged in focus group discussions over three days to generate prompts for a generative AI art. Through the lens of restorying, the prompts had students conceptualize a future with a focus on their Mexican-American heritage, local community, and technology. The study revealed that students associated their heritage with symbolic representations such as food and music, and characterized the community as a commercialized space while also emphasizing locations conducive to family-oriented activities. As a result, technology in community spaces was associated with consumerism. However, when envisioning a futuristic, transformed community, they made deeper connections between the role of technology in the community, making intricate connections between community improvements and technology-based solutions. This underscores the need for computing education to dedicate time for young learners to reflect on the role technology has on their current culture and community to make deeper connections.

Bilingual children have unique needs for school readiness as they navigate between two languages and cultures. A supportive home language environment, where children are frequently exposed to language through conversation and reading, can positively impact their language development and prepare them for school. However, current conversational agents and e-books designed for children do not typically take into account the cultural and linguistic needs of bilingual children and do not involve parents. This project presents the development of a bilingual conversational agent and accompanying e-book, designed to support parent-child interactions and promote language development for Latinx Spanish-English bilingual children. Results from a user study indicate that the bilingual agent effectively engages children verbally and encourages parental involvement in reading processes. The study also provides design insights for creating conversational agents for bilingual children.

As computing education begins to grow in K-12 classrooms, it is increasingly important to understand the relationships between a student's coding attitudes and computing outcomes. While work has been done at the undergraduate and high school level, less is known about elementary students, and even less about Latinx students. We sought to explore the connections between Latinx elementary students' coding attitudes and computational thinking (CT) skills after participating in a year-long, remote computing curriculum in a public school district in Southern California. We collected validated measures on coding attitudes and CT skills for 164 fourth-grade students. We used structural equation modeling to analyze the relationship between the coding attitude constructs (i.e., confidence, utility, perception of coders, social influences, and interest) and scores on a CT assessment while controlling for demographic factors (i.e., gender, English language fluency, free or reduced lunch status, reading and math standardized test scores). In a model demonstrating acceptable fit, only math scores were a significant predictor of CT scores and coding confidence. Confidence was found to be significantly associated with the other attitude constructs except for perception of coders. Our results indicate that confidence plays a prominent role in student computing learning, especially at a young age. Efforts to better support Latinx students in computer science should include strategies that address students' coding confidence, such as developing positive perceptions of a student's learning process (e.g., failures as learning opportunities) in specific coding skills and practices (e.g., tinkering, debugging).

This study analyzed the relationship between computational thinking (CT) and coding attitudes of upper elementary students after exposure to a year-long CT curriculum. Using ordinary least squares regression and controlling for student demographics (i.e., gender and English Learner (EL) status), we found that CT skills were a significant factor in modeling coding attitudes, regardless of demographic controls. Interviews of the students unveiled an interaction between coding interest and social values in a debugging process.

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.