The demand for qualifed computing professionals is high, with
thousands of positions remaining unflled each year. To create more
qualifed professionals, initiatives to attract and engage students in
computer science have been proposed, but they tend to concentrate
on primary, secondary (K-12), and post-secondary (college) levels.
With many adults looking for better career opportunities, it is sur-
prising that few computer science initiatives focus on attracting
adult learners to the feld. This paper presents the results of an infor-
mal computer programming course that teaches the foundational
concepts of computer programming to adults as they program hip-
hop beats. This course is designed to attract adult learners that
otherwise might have never considered computer programming,
building their confdence and skills. We conducted this course on-
line, two nights a week, for fve weeks, for about 40 participants.
Afterward, we conducted a qualitative analysis of written survey
data. We found that the adult learners’ perception of computer
programming changed during the course, with many participants
planning their next step in computing education.
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STEM Hip-hop Pedagogy: A Meta-synthesis on Hip-hop Pedagogy STEM Interventions Tools for Underrepresented Minorities in K-12 Education
Hip-hop pedagogy is the use of hip-hop artifacts and culture as resources to a curriculum or instruction. Applying hip-hop pedagogy to academic interventions has been suggested to effectively increase the value and connection to course content as well as the ability to re-envision content into ones that reflect underrepresented students of color’s lived experiences. As there is a gap in African American and non White Latino American performance in STEM compared to their White and Asian American counterparts, and a high demand in prospective STEM occupations (namely computer and information technology), hip-hop pedagogy can be leveraged to improve STEM identity to successively improve STEM performance. This paper represents the first stage of a case study to analyze and validate hip-hop pedagogical tools for computing and STEM instruction and outreach. This paper describes a qualitative meta-synthesis of hip-hop pedagogy and associated STEM outreach programs. Findings on hip-hop pedagogy in computing and STEM outreach interventions are discussed to aid in supporting and creating future hip-hop pedagogical interventions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1818458
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10107291
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Southeast Conference
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 46 to 52
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Long before the internet provided us with a networked digital system, music exchanges had created a global networked analog system, built of recordings, radio broadcasts, and live performance. The features that allowed some audio formations to go viral, while others failed, fall at the intersection of three domains: access, culture, and cognition. We know how the explosive growth of the hip hop recording industry addressed the access problem, and how hip hop lyrics addressed cultural needs. But why does hip hop make your ass shake? This essay proposes that hip hop artists were creating an innovation in brain-to-brain connectivity. That is to say, there are deep parts of the limbic system that had not previously been connected to linguistic centers in the combination of neural and social pathways that hip hop facilitated. This research is not an argument for using computational neuroscience to analyze hip hop. Rather, it is asking what hip hop artists accomplished as the street version of computational neuroscientists; and, how they strategically deployed Black music traditions to rewire the world’s global rhythmic nervous system for new cognitive, cultural, and political alignments and sensibilities.more » « less
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3299815.3314431
