Broadening the participation of underrepresented students in computer science fields requires careful design and implementation of culturally responsive curricula and technologies. Culturally Situated Design Tools (CSDTs) address this by engaging students in historic, cultural, and meaningful design projects based on community practices. To date, CSDT research has only been conducted in short interventions outside of CS classrooms. This paper reports on the first semester-long introductory CS course based on CSDTs, which was piloted with 51 high school students during the 2017-2018 school year. The goal of this study was to examine if a culturally responsive computing curriculum could teach computer science principles and improve student engagement. Pre-post tests, field notes, weekly teacher meetings, formative assessments, and teacher and student interviews were analyzed to assess successes and failures during implementation. The results indicate students learned the conceptual material in 6 months rather than in the 9 months previously required by the teacher. Students were also able to apply these concepts afterward when programming in Python, implying knowledge transfer. However, student opinions about culture and computing didn't improve, and student engagement was below initial expectations. Thus we explore some of the many challenges: keeping a fully integrated cultural curriculum while satisfying CS standards, maintaining student engagement, and building student agency and self-regulation. We end with a brief description for how we intend to address some of these challenges in the second iteration of this program, scheduled for fall 2018. After which a study is planned to compare this curriculum to others.
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Artificial Intelligence and Video Game Creation: A Framework for the New Logic of Autonomous Design
Autonomous, intelligent tools are reshaping all sorts of work practices, including innovative design work. These tools generate outcomes with little or no user intervention and produce designs of unprecedented complexity and originality, ushering profound changes to how organizations will design and innovate in future. In this paper, we formulate conceptual foundations to analyze the impact of autonomous design tools on design work. We proceed in two steps. First, we conceptualize autonomous design tools as ‘rational’ agents which will participate in the design process. We show that such agency can be realized through two separate approaches of information processing: symbolic and connectionist. Second, we adopt control theory to unpack the relationships between the autonomous design tools, human actors involved in the design, and the environment in which the tools operate. The proposed conceptual framework lays a foundation for studying the new kind of material agency of autonomous design tools in organizational contexts. We illustrate the analytical value of the proposed framework by drawing on two examples from the development of Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon Wildlands video game, which relied on such tools. We conclude this essay by constructing a tentative research agenda for the research into autonomous design tools and design work.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10298086
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Digital Social Research
- Volume:
- 2
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2003-1998
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v2i3.46
