As data becomes integral to civic processes and resource distribution, there is a need for methods in which communities generate, interpret, and act on data to address their priorities. We introduce ROOTED (Reclaiming and Organizing Our Truths for Equity through Data), a community-centered framework grounded in Black Feminist Thought. By cultivating community data practices, ROOTED helps residents leverage their local insights, lived experiences, and data to pursue equitable outcomes by using data as a tool for advocacy, organizing, and local transformation. Through two case studies, we demonstrate how researchers and communities can collaboratively implement ROOTED. Our findings suggest that residents use data to build power and relationships to collectively achieve their goals. This paper contributes a framework and case study examples that demonstrate how to design community data systems and practices that produce actionable outcomes aligned with residents’ visions for their futures.

Despite the emergence of intersectional computing and increased scholarship that utilizes the concept of intersectionality, there is a lack of consensus about the appropriation of intersectionality as a critical framework within the computing education community. Intersectionality provides a critical lens for understanding and analyzing the complexity in human experiences that are shaped by multiple social constructs (race, gender, class, etc.) in mutually influencing ways. What lies at the heart of the matter is acknowledging the humanity of intersectional populations to create safe spaces and a sense of belonging in the computing community. However, using Eurocentric research methods when working with intersectional populations tends to further marginalize them. Calling into question the validity of Eurocentric methods, we argue for alternative ways of knowing in CS education research that affirm intersectional populations. Applying critical autoethnography to our own body of computing education research, we leverage Black feminist epistemologies or Black women's ways of knowing to differentiate intersectional studies from studies of intersectional populations.

The communities in which we live and learn are largely the product of historical decisions related to race and ethnicity made by politicians, elected officials, and others with power and money. In Chicago, during the Great Migration, the Chicago Real Estate Board set up a committee that determined where Black residents could and could not live. In the 1930's redlining and greenlining funneled money and resources away from areas identified as "bad investments," which were communities that were non-white, and toward white communities deemed to be a "better investment." In the 1970s, desegregation mandates resulted in new magnet and selective enrollment schools that were open to anyone but required young people to travel far from their homes to attend. Today, boundaries, such as Wards and neighborhood school districts, continue to be drawn and redrawn-sometimes with the best intentions-in ways that fracture communities. These imprints of the past continue to impact ways of being today that continue to create an inequitable present that is not authentic to the needs and desires of the communities in those places. Creating a more equitable landscape for learning science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics, and sports (STEAMS) in the future requires making the past and present of places visible and giving agency to communities to change their landscapes in ways that serve their current and future needs. Using lessons learned from over 20 years designing learning ecosystems in collaboration with cities, neighborhoods, affinity groups, civic learning institutions, and families, I will put forth the concept of opportunity landscaping as a hyperlocal ecosystem approach to supporting communities in visualizing and tuning their learning infrastructure to provide the learning places, spaces, resources, caring adults, and peers to nurture healthy STEM identities and lifestyles for youth and families living in historically disinvested communities. Given my background as a computer scientist, I will focus examples of efforts to develop computational making activities throughout the ecosystems discussed.

In this paper, we examine a co-design workshop in which youth redesigned a learning activity for critical engagement with computing for the Hour of Code, an annual event that offers hour-long introductory computing activities to youth. We conducted co-design workshops during summer 2021 in two cities with 12 youth of Color (ages 11-15 years), in which we employed different reflective, collaborative and making activities to investigate youths’ critical perceptions of computing and address the following research questions: (1) What are the perspectives of youth from groups historically marginalized in computing on critical issues in computing? (2) What kinds of projects do youth create in Scratch to address critical issues in computing? and (3) How do youth reflect on the learning activity and make changes to implement it with their peers? In the discussion, we address what we learned about co-designing a critical computing learning activity with youth.

This study focuses on the effectiveness of parent communication and engagement in an out-of-school (OST) STEM program for Black and Latina middle school girls. Through analysis of email open rates, a post-program survey, and attendance records, we found that our communication was successful in reaching parents, despite a drop in parent participation in online events during the pandemic. Our results suggest that communication efforts should be consistent, personalized, and inclusive. For CS educators interested in engaging families, we propose that a multi-layered communication approach is required to maintain connection with parents, especially during unpredictable circumstances.

Global protests and civil unrest in 2020 has renewed the world’s interest in addressing injustice due to structural racism and oppression toward Black and Latinx people in all aspects of society, including computing. In this article, we argue that to address and repair the harm created by institutions, policies, and practices that have systematically excluded Black and Latina girls from computer science, an intersectional, transformative justice approach must be taken. Leveraging testimonial authority, we share our past 8 years of experience designing, implementing, and studying Digital Youth Divas, a programmatic and systemic approach to encouraging middle school Black and Latina girls to participate in STEM. Specifically, we propose three principles to counter structural racism and oppression embedded in society and computing education: computing education must (1) address local histories of injustice by engaging community members; (2) counter negative stereotypes perpetuated in computer science by creating inclusive safe spaces and counter-narratives; and (3) build sustainable, computational capacity in communities. To illustrate each principle, we provide specific examples of the harm created by racist policies and systems and their effect on a specific community. We then describe our attempt to create counter structures and the subsequent outcomes for the girls, their families, and the community. This work contributes a framework for STEM and computing educators to integrate transformative justice as a method of repairing the harm that both society and the field of computing has and continues to cause Black and Latinx communities. We charge policy makers, educators, researchers, and community leaders to examine histories of oppression in their communities and to adopt holistic, transformative approaches that counter structural oppression at the individual and system level.

To address participation inequities among youth in computer science programs, this study examined how parents evaluate out- of-school time (OST) STEM programs for their children. We facilitated a workshop and conducted interviews with parents in Digital Youth Divas (DYD), an OST STEM program for middle-school girls who are underrepresented in computing. We found that parents prefer programs that are free, at accessible locations, and run by reputable educational institutions. Parents also identified barriers such as the lack of a parent network and conflicting schedules. These challenges must be addressed in order to encourage participation in OST computing science programs.

To address the goal of increasing and broadening participation of youth in STEM fields, a learning ecosystem approach is a promising strategy. Learning analytics can play an important role in such efforts which aim to build learning supports across the diverse spaces in which learning and development occurs, including informal, formal, and online contexts. This paper introduces a city-level learning analytics implementation effort in a developing STEM ecosystem in one mid-sized city. We describe aspects of our design and research approach and challenges that emerge by taking a learning ecosystem perspective of learning and development.

This paper proposes a framework which aims to leverage data from informal learning environments to provide insights about youth engagement for various stakeholders. To explore the framework, we created metrics to examine the engagement of 98 middle school-aged girls during a 20-week STEM program using attendance records and log data from an online learning platform coded to reflect 21st century learning activities. We present preliminary analyses using the metrics, focusing on how they can help stakeholders understand engagement and equity of participation.

While log analysis in massively open online courses and other online learning environments has mainly focused on traditional measures, such as completion rates and views of course content, research is responding to calls for analytic frameworks that are more reflective of social learning models. We introduce a generalizable approach to automatically code log data that highlights educator support roles and student actions that are consistent with recent conceptualizations of 21st century learning, such as creative production, self-directed learning, and social learning. Here, we describe details of a log-coding framework that builds from prior mixed method studies of the use of iRemix, an online social learning network, by middle school youth and adult educators in blended learning contexts.