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The rapid expansion of K-12 computer science education highlights the urgent need for well-prepared teachers. The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) facilitates the development of local teacher professional learning communities (PLCs) through CSTA chapters. This study investigated the types of support CSTA chapters provide, how teacher leaders establish local PLCs and engage teachers of computer science, and the challenges encountered in this process. The investigation included multi-year focus group interviews with chapter leaders and teacher member surveys. The findings reveal that CSTA chapters serve as vital resources of professional support, amplify teachers’ voices, and nurture their professional identities in teaching computer science. This study provides a nuanced understanding of local PLCs for computer science educators, informing future endeavors in teacher preparation and development. 

Black women remain severely underrepresented in computing despite ongoing efforts to diversify the field. Given that Black women exist at the intersection of both racial and gendered identities, tailored approaches are necessary to address the unique barriers Black women face in computing. However, it is difficult to quantitatively evaluate the efficacy of interventions designed to retain Black women in computing, since samples of computing students typically contain too few Black women for robust statistical analysis. Using about a decade of student survey responses from an National Science Foundation–funded Broadening Participation in Computing alliance, we use regression analyses to quantitatively examine the connection between different types of interventions and Black women’s intentions to persist in computing and how this compares to other students (specifically, Black men, white women, and white men). This comparison allows us to quantitatively explore how Black women’s needs are both distinct from—and similar to—other students. We find that career awareness and faculty mentorship are the two interventions that have a statistically significant, positive correlation with Black women’s computing persistence intentions. No evidence was found that increasing confidence or developing skills/knowledge was correlated with Black women’s computing persistence intentions, which we posit is because Black women must be highly committed and confident to pursue computing in college. Last, our results suggest that many efforts to increase the number of women in computing are focused on meeting the needs of white women. While further analyses are needed to fully understand the impact of complex intersectional identities in computing, this large-scale quantitative analysis contributes to our understanding of the nuances of Black women’s needs in computing. 

To engage diverse populations of students who may not self-select into computing courses, a curriculum for a middle school music technology + computer science course that addresses learning standards for both subjects was developed and deployed. Students who engage with the curriculum learn modern music production techniques and computational thinking concepts. This is through a mix of traditional approaches to music technology education (digital audio workstations) and computational approaches via a culturally relevant learning platform that introduces students to coding through music production and remixing. This poster reflects on the last two years of curriculum design and deployment, teacher training, and student and educator engagement and feedback to provide insight into the teaching (and learning) of computational thinking in the music technology classroom. 

With the increasing prevalence of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, there is a growing need to integrate natural language processing (NLP) into K-12 education to better prepare young learners for the future AI landscape. NLP, a sub-field of AI that serves as the foundation of LLMs and many advanced AI applications, holds the potential to enrich learning in core subjects in K-12 classrooms. In this experience report, we present our efforts to integrate NLP into science classrooms with 98 middle school students across two US states, aiming to increase students’ experience and engagement with NLP models through textual data analyses and visualizations. We designed learning activities, developed an NLP-based interactive visualization platform, and facilitated classroom learning in close collaboration with middle school science teachers. This experience report aims to contribute to the growing body of work on integrating NLP into K-12 education by providing insights and practical guidelines for practitioners, researchers, and curriculum designers. 

Through our work to examine mathematical and computational learning in authentic and convivial contexts that requires creativity, imagination, reasoning, and discourse, we have theorized an experiential learning cycle that attends to the development of voice, agency, and identity needed in young people for an earned insurgency—the right to demand change. Our work underscores how the current situation that many students face in classrooms amounts to a type of cognitive segregation that denies these students access to authentic and empowering intellectual agency. By facilitating a process whereby students, using their own creative and imaginative means, intentionally develop a type of ownership over the exploration and application of the mathematical concepts they are being taught, we help students move from simple surface level, syntactic understandings, to deeper semantic learning that is more personally significant and meaningful. 

Effective professional learning communities (PLCs) are important in supporting teacher learning. This study investigated computer science (CS) teacher leaders’ perspectives on the lessons and the challenges in supporting CS teachers through local PLCs. We purposefully selected ten CSTA chapters and conducted focus group interviews with the chapter leaders between 2020 and 2022. Our findings indicated that these PLCs offered social-emotional support, continual networking opportunities, and rich professional learning resources. Also, they amplified teachers’ voices and supported CS teachers’ professional identity building. To engage CS teachers, the teacher leaders built trust, collaborated with other PLCs or organizations, and set an inclusive PLC culture. These PLCs had challenges in recruitment, leadership development and transition, and building group identity.