In a coastal community, middle school students logged into a computer science module to learn about the concept of loops in animation. But instead of a generic animated graphic showing two animals racing toward a finish line, they saw an image of their local beach. Two lifeguard boats — one labeled with the name of their town, the other with the name of a neighboring community — were racing toward the shore in their region’s popular summer lifeguard games.
Their teacher had customized the material so that it reflected an important part of her students’ lives, using a new “harmonizing process” developed by a team led by University of Maryland College of Education Associate Professor David Weintrop. By supporting teachers as they make computer science lessons more meaningful and relevant to students’ identities, interests and lived experiences, the project is helping to motivate students and increase their confidence and sense of belonging, Weintrop explains.
“The lifeguard boat race is a nice demonstration of what it looks like to situate computer science instruction in ways that resonate with who students are and the lives that they're living,” says Weintrop. This is particularly important in subject areas like computer science, he says, where female and nonbinary students, students of color, non-native English speakers and neurodivergent students have historically been excluded.
Weintrop and his team have led five professional development workshops where more than 75 teachers have learned to customize materials from Scratch Encore, a computer science curriculum for grades 4 to 8 that Weintrop developed with colleagues from the University of Chicago and Chicago Public Schools. Approximately 30,000 students have used Scratch Encore since it debuted in 2019. Designed to be used with Scratch, a free programming language, Scratch Encore includes 15 modules that make computer science more culturally and personally relevant by connecting to traditions from diverse cultures, as well as topics of high interest to young people, such as sports and gaming.
Although Scratch Encore is already designed to make computer science relevant to a wide range of students, the harmonizing process takes this idea a step further by enabling teachers to quickly customize lessons to their specific communities. The research team has developed strategies, scaffolds and technological tools to support teachers throughout the three steps of the process: ideation, implementation and evaluation. These resources include prompts to help teachers generate and refine ideas, surveys to collect data on students’ interests, and Conjuror, a generative AI tool that helps teachers brainstorm ideas and create customized Scratch projects and worksheets. Throughout the process, teachers work to maintain the learning objectives of the original modules.
Joeleen Takano, who teaches computer science at a racially and ethnically diverse middle school in Sacramento, California, has used the Conjuror tool to adapt Scratch Encore lessons to reflect her students’ cultures, including through food, music and dance.
“Students were able to recognize aspects of their own cultures in the lessons and share personal connections to the topics,” says Takano. “My goal is to create an inclusive classroom where every student feels that their identity, creativity and perspective have a place in computer science.”
Other teachers have added local touches by using pictures of their middle school’s gym as a setting for a sports-related computer science lesson, or featuring photos of the school principal. “The kids get really excited about that,” says Weintrop.
Weintrop and his co-authors at the University of Chicago, including Associate Professor Diana Franklin, Doctoral Student Minh Tran and Curriculum Development Specialist Jennifer Palmer, recently documented their work in the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education. Their professional development workshops are funded by the National Science Foundation and through Weintrop’s stipend as a College of Education Dean’s Impact Professor.
Photo by iStock
