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.

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.

Background: The growing complexity of the impacts of computing technologies on adolescents’ lives requires them to make similarly complex decisions around technology, fueling a rise in education efforts to look at the ethical implications of these advancements with young people. Though prior computing ethics education efforts integrate ethical perspectives, they have rarely drawn from scholarship on how to teach ethics and philosophy.

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.

Learning programming benefits from self-regulation, but novices lack support for developing these skills of cognitive control. To support their development, we designed Code Replayer, an online tool that enables novice programmers to practice programming and then replay their coding process to reflect and identify process improvements. To evaluate the impact of replaying code on self-regulation, we conducted a formative qualitative evaluation with 21 novice programmers who used Code Replayer to practice writing code. We found that after watching code replays, participants more frequently interpreted problem prompts and planned their solutions, two crucial self-regulation behaviors that novices often overlook. We interpret our results by focusing on two focal points in the design of code replays as a programming self-regulation intervention: interpreting pauses in replays and ensuring replays of struggle are more informative and less detrimental.