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In the push to broaden participation in computer science (CS) within the United States, there have been a number of highly successful efforts to engage urban high schools and communities. As urban areas often have high concentrations of poverty and underrepresented populations, these efforts meet a well-known need, and have a strong potential impact. However, urban audiences are not the only ones to lack adequate computer science education opportunities. In the United States, 1 in 5 people live in a rural area [19], and studies consistently show that rural areas offer fewer opportunities for students to engage with computer science than their urban and suburban peers. While some of the challenges rural schools face are shared by urban schools, the rural schools also have unique challenges that must be understood before engaging in successful intervention efforts. This paper describes one effort to support rural schools, their teachers, and their students. We seek to share the lessons we have learned in the hope that other programs may benefit. 

Rural populations represent an important and often overlooked audience for broadening participation in computing efforts. More than 20% of all students in the United States live in a rural region, and surveys of access to computing education consistently show these students have less opportunity to and engagement in learning computer science than both suburban and urban peers. Recent scholarship has suggested that rural populations subscribe to a cohesive group identity that (at least in some cases) can subsume ethnic and racial identities, especially important when we consider 22% of the rural population is composed of individuals with these intersectional identities. In this paper we describe example lessons under development for use in our Cyber Pipeline project, an outreach program that provides Kansas schools with a modular computing curriculum and in-service teachers with professional development training to utilize it. These lessons are being developed using culturally relevant pedagogy and a community learning approach to ground the lessons in the everyday experiences, cultural identities, and concerns of these rural students. We are co-developing these lessons with both K-12 teachers in the Cyber Pipeline and disciplinary experts across our campus. We present our our approach in the hopes that it will be of benefit to other educators seeking to reach rural populations.