What if there could be a way to teach kids to use technology while gaining language skills at the same time?
That’s the question researchers at UC Irvine are trying to answer.
Professor Mark Warschauer and his team at the university are hoping to level the playing field to ensure that all students – rich or poor, native English speakers or not – have the same access to learning to communicate with computers.
From logging onto Zoom every morning and playing online games, America’s students have spent more time interacting with technology over the last year than ever before. It’s clear that students who are unfamiliar with digital tools will be at a disadvantage in our rapidly digitizing world.
But not all students are exposed to computer science classes early on in their schooling. Students placed in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes are generally not afforded time in their day for extra classes like computer science.
To encourage students from all backgrounds to learn coding – the language of computers – the team of researchers developed a program called “Elementary Computing for All,” which integrates computer science into literacy instruction.
“This is personal for me,” says Sharin Jacob, a PhD student on the team. Jacob grew up bilingual in English and Arabic, thanks to her mother’s Egyptian upbringing, but at the age of 11, her teachers tried to place her in ESL classes because of her accent.
“My parents decided from that day on to only speak to me in English. I lost my Arabic, and to me that is tragic. I don’t want to see that happen to the next generation,” Jacob says.
Literacy, computational thinking
Many of us think of computer science as a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) field, but it’s more than that.
Warschauer explains that the type of simple coding that students are first introduced to “is really very narrative based. It’s writing stories about their lives and about other things. … There’s a lot of overlap with literacy and narrative.”
The curriculum that he and his team developed allows students, both native English speakers and English learners, to work on their literacy skills and computer skills simultaneously. Communicating with a computer, through coding, has many of the same elements of communicating with others through language.
Learning to code relies on the ability to find and learn from patterns in our environment, whether they be patterns in the shapes of leaves on different trees or patterns in the way COVID-19 spreads in different settings. And what is language full of? Patterns. From verb conjugations to pluralization of nouns, language learners rely on finding and learning from patterns to become fluent.
Their first stop in implementing the Elementary Computing for All curriculum was Santa Ana Unified, a school district with 93% Latinx students. Warschauer and his team worked with teachers, many of whom had never coded before, over the summer to prepare them for teaching the curriculum. Then the teachers began guiding students through weekly computational activities that integrated culture and language learning.
Building STEM identities
According to a 2013 survey by the National Science Foundation, only 4.2% of the people in the U.S. who get doctorates in science and engineering are Hispanic. That is drastically lower than the 17% of the U.S. population who identified as Hispanic in 2013.
Because of the disparities within science fields, studies have shown that students from underrepresented groups are less likely to feel like they belong in STEM fields. Most curricula don’t make a point of highlighting diverse computer scientists or incorporating students’ diverse identities into coding activities.
This is where the ECforAll curriculum comes in.
Built into the ECforAll curriculum are stories that celebrate the accomplishments of computer scientists from different backgrounds. For instance, one unit begins with a video about Margaret Zoila Dominguez, an optical engineer at NASA. Scenes of her in the lab, wearing head-to-toe protective equipment, are overlaid with audio of her telling the story of how she got involved in the research she does now.
After a short clip of Dominguez teaching a dance class in her free time, the video closes with her proudly saying, “I’m Latina and I love technology.”
Stories like this are so important for under-represented minority students to hear because they allow students to imagine themselves as computer scientists, doctors or even optical engineers. Warschauer and other researchers in the field refer to this as building a STEM identity, or the feeling of fitting in with STEM fields.
Another way the ECforAll curriculum aims to build students’ STEM identities is through encouraging students to infuse aspects of their identity into their projects, like in the “About Me” project. Here, the students learn about coding “events” – actions that cause other things to happen. Such as pressing a button that causes a bell to ring.
The students brainstorm facts about themselves that they’d like to share, a scenic background that’s relevant to their interests, and a character that suits them. Then they put together a sequence of blocks that make the character say something like “I like to play soccer.” Changing the character’s costume, adding background music, and making the character move around are also options they have to customize their program.
“We are working to develop a computer science curriculum that builds on the rich cultural and linguistic assets that students bring to the classroom,” says Jacob. “We want students to feel that their backgrounds are celebrated and are important for classroom learning and the learning of computer science.”
Computing across the country
While the pandemic stifled the research, this past year highlights the importance of the face-to-face component of the curriculum. For students, getting in-person support from their teachers and socializing with their peers while completing these projects really improves their learning of the material.
The pandemic also highlights the importance of digital technology in education and has ignited interest from various school districts to incorporate the curriculum into their classrooms.
The UCI researchers have already partnered with a team at the University of Chicago to try out the program in Chicago Public Schools, as well as schools in San Francisco. While this curriculum was built with Santa Ana’s Latino students in mind, the team hopes the principles of diversity and inclusion will help other students around the county.
“When we open doors to computing, diverse students will contribute new perspectives that foster creative and innovative approaches to solving the problems that we as a nation face,” Jacob says. “By breaking the language code, we can not only help our students, but, with them, start to build a better and more just world.”
