SIGCSE2014 Preview: How informal CS education (unfortunately) is hidden from poor families
February 28, 2014 at 1:19 am 3 comments
I’ve been excited to see this paper get published since Betsy first told me about the work. The paper described below (by Betsy DiSalvo, Cecili Reid, and Parisa Khanipour Roshan) looks at the terms that families commonly use to find on-line resources to help their children learn about computer science. They didn’t find Alice or Scratch or Blockly — none of the things that would be our first choices for CS education opportunities on-line. Betsy and her students show how we accidentally hide our resources from the uneducated and under-privileged, by presuming that the searchers are well-educated and privileged. They point out that this is one way that open education resources actually actually increase the socioeconomic gap, by not being easily discoverable by those without privilege. I got to see a preview of this talk, and the results are surprising — a video of the preview talk will be available here. Friday March 7, 3:45-5, in Room Hanover DE.
They Can’t Find Us: The Search for Informal CS Education
In this study we found that search terms that would likely be used by parents to find out-of-school computer science (CS) learning opportunities for their children yielded remarkably unproductive results. This is important to the field of CS education because, to date, there is no empirical evidence that demonstrates how a lack of CS vocabulary is a barrier to accessing informal CS learning opportunities. This study focuses on the experience of parents who do not have the privilege of education and technical experience when searching for learning opportunities for their children. The findings presented will demonstrate that issues of access to CS education go beyond technical means, and include ability to conduct suitable searches and identify appropriate computational learning tools. Out-of-school learning is an important factor in who is motivated and prepared to study computer science in college. It is likely that without early access to informal CS learning, fewer students are motivated to explore CS in formal classrooms.
via SIGCSE2014 – OpenConf Peer Review & Conference Management System.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: Alice, BPC, broadening participation in computing, computing for everyone, Scratch.
1. SIGSCE Day 2, “Focus on K-12: Informal Education, Curriculum and Robots”, Paper 1, 3:45-5:00, (#SIGCSE2014) | Nick Falkner | March 7, 2014 at 4:03 pm
[…] CS Education” by Betsy DiSalvo, Cecili Reid, Parisa Khanipour Roshan, all from Georgia Tech. (Mark wrote this paper up recently.) There are lots of resources around, MOOCs, on-line systems tools, Khan academy and Code Academy […]
2.
Daily Digest – 3/3/14 | sydneymoyer | March 19, 2014 at 2:47 pm
[…] SIGCSE2014 Preview: How informal CS education (unfortunately) is hidden from poor families Computing Education The paper described below (by Betsy DiSalvo, Cecili Reid, and Parisa Khanipour Roshan) looks at the terms that families commonly use to find on-line resources to help their children learn about computer science. […]
3.
Educational Technology as Imperialism: Finding a middle ground between Papert and Freire | Computing Education Blog | November 7, 2014 at 8:57 am
[…] like Scratch tend to be even more privileged than those in undergrad CS classes) and Betsy DiSalvo (who found that immigrant families don’t even know what words to search for in order to find le…). Open education efforts alone are unlikely to reach the underprivileged students who most need […]