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There is a national need to increase the number of minority students entering STEM fields with essential computing skills. To increase minority students’ interest and engagement in computing, a researcher-practitioner partnership between the University of Texas at El Paso and the El Paso Independent School District, developed and implemented a culturally and linguistically responsive curriculum and pedagogy to introduce computational thinking (CT) in two middle schools across different subject areas in a borderland region. The curriculum leveraged the Sol y Agua game – a bilingual, culturally-responsive game designed to engage students of this region in CT. This paper describes the process and initial findings of this project. The quantitative data from in-game analyses show that students utilized the language change feature to switch from English to Spanish more frequently than the other way – highlighting the need for educational platforms relatable to students through language, environment, and cultural context. Analyses of the qualitative data indicate that while teachers/team members understood CT and translanguaging concepts and taught lesson units that provided opportunities to practice both, CT and translanguaging were largely implicit in the curriculum. In collaborative analyses of these patterns, teachers described additional supports that would help them to make CT instruction and translanguaging strategies more explicit in the content and pedagogy, highlighting the need for systematic, targeted integration of these concepts. 

Getting students engaged with out-of-class activities has been a long-standing challenge. With large class sizes, providing timely feedback to students is also challenging for faculty members. Students are spending fewer hours to study class content outside the classroom for several reasons, including working more hours because of rising tuition and living expenses. This paper describes a newly developed mobile learning system, Dysgu, which provides an engaging learning experience for students outside the classroom. Dysgu has interactive and auto-graded exercises to help students practice concepts. Students can see their progress and class standing as they work on the exercises. The mobile platform was deployed in two semesters at two different universities. We saw improved student grades, more on-time submissions, and the acknowledgment of useful features such as interactive activity and the ability to see the overall class status using this new mobile platform. 

Student engagement with out-of-class activities is becoming more difficult as students spend fewer hours outside the classroom studying the content. This research developed a mobile educational platform, Dysgu, to provide students with an optimal learning experience outside of the classroom. Dysgu includes social networking and gamification features to increase student engagement. The platform offers interactive auto-graded assessments to help students practice concepts and take tests. Students can see their scores and a summary of the performance of the rest of the class. We used Dysgu for multiple out-of-class activities at two universities with different student demographics for two semesters. The data shows that students obtain better grades when using Dysgu. We also saw more on-time or ahead-of-time submissions with Dysgu. Survey responses indicated several Dysgu features which students found helpful. We conclude that digital educational platforms should consider features to support scaffolding to master the concept, peer influence to keep students engaged, self-reflection to foster critical thinking, and easy adaption of the platform to reduce faculty workload and improve students’ acceptance of the system. 

It is a well-documented challenge to keep students engaged and motivated in out-of-class activities. More students now have part- or full-time jobs and less time to study. Supporting their academic growth and success requires acknowledging the higher commitments to the jobs while providing appropriate mechanisms to make the best use of their available times. This paper presents a mobile educational platform, Dysgu, that aims to engage students in out-of-class activities. An initial study completed on this platform investigates the role of peer influence to increase student engagement in an early college class. Data indicates students prefer Dysgu for out-of-class activities compared to traditional pen- and paper-based activities. Students noted that peer influence, in the form of scores compared to the rest of the class, was highly motivating. We also observed more on-time submissions when using Dysgu. 

Theoretical understanding of bilingualism has advanced tremendously in recent decades, moving from colonialist understandings of named languages as static, separate entities to decolonializing conceptualizations of dynamic translanguaging (García, 2009)—or dynamic use of speakers’ whole linguistic repertoires to serve communicative needs. As we work to include this theoretical shift into teacher education and into instructional practice in diverse contexts, we ask what facilitates educators’ learning of new ways of seeing bilingualism and what gets in the way? This presentation examines adults’ learning experiences in a collaborative research project to use translanguaging pedagogy as a way to increase minoritized bilingual students’ access to computer science education. We —a team of teachers, administrators, teacher educators, and researchers working onthe US-Mexico border—use ethnographic data to explore how our beliefs about bilingualism and language in education surface and shift in the work. We discuss the potential of science education as a location and opportunity to advance educators’ understandings of holistic, dynamic bilingualism, and we draw connections to possibilities in science education in Paraguay. 

The Sol y Agua researcher-practitioner partnership (RPP) project introduces computational thinking (CT) in the middle school of the Paso del Norte region using a linguistically and culturally responsive approach. At the core of this RPP is the Sol y Agua game, a bilingual, culturally- and environmentally-relevant educational game developed at the University of Texas at El Paso to introduce computing and STEM topics in middle school. The Sol y Agua RPP includes some critical areas for a successful RPP, including partnership building and the focus on a linguistically and culturally-responsive pedagogy and content development. We describe our approach to build a sustainable RPP, incorporating bilingual pedagogy, and integrating CT through a culturally- and environmentally-relevant game as part of our RPP experience. 

Keeping students engaged with the course contents between classes is challenging. Although out-of-class activities are used to address this challenge, they have limited impacts on improving student's engagement outside the classroom because of the lack of real-time feedback and progress updates. For this reason, these types of activities are less appealing to the current generation of students who feel the pull of instant gratification more intensely. This paper presents a mobile learning system, named Dysgu, which enables students to work on their out-of-class activities, compare their progress with the rest of the class, and improve their self-efficacy. The goal of Dysgu is to better engage students with out-of-class activities and reduce procrastination in those activities. By using Dysgu, faculty can facilitate and monitor learning even after the students leave the classroom and intervene early when students fall behind their peers. 

The majority of Computer Science courses frequently use out-of-class activities to promote skill-building. Yet, the shortcomings of these activities limit their applicability in improving students' skills. This poster presents an innovative mobile-app-based approach to engage students in out-of-class activities. The app - Dysgu - builds on the theories of social learning and enables instructors to break regular out-of-class activities into smaller and interactive entities with instructional scaffolding. Dysgu allows students to compare their progress with their peers and provides personalized notifications and feedbacks to keep students engaged. The goal is to improve student's self-efficacy and engagement in out-of-class activities. 

It is believed that if students are well engaged in the learning process within the classroom, they will continue the learning process independently outside the classroom. To facilitate such out-of-class learning, there is a plethora of traditional techniques with a variety of learning theoretical backgrounds. While out-of-class activities based on these techniques have shown to improve a student’s overall quality of learning, traditional activities lack the supervision, instant feedback, and personalization that the current generation of students expects. With the rising cost of college tuition, many of today’s students are working more hours outside of an educational setting and therefore need more supervision and encouragement than their predecessors. These factors make traditional out-of-class activities not effective to achieve the desired level of student learning and engagement outside the classroom. The faculty needs to rethink ways to redesign traditional out-of-class activities to make these activities more effective for this generation of students. This paper presents a review of the literature on and categorization of traditional out-of-class activities. The paper also discusses the results of a survey of what the faculty is doing to engage and continue student learning outside the classroom. Finally, the paper presents a new way of designing and delivering out-of-class activities that have the potential to increase student engagement with the help of instructional scaffolding, interactive activities, and personalization and adaptation. 

This research to practice work in progress paper will present a mobile learning environment, called Dysgu (`learning' in Welsh), which will provide enhanced learning experience outside the classroom. The Dysgu environment provides students with interactive and motivating out-of-class activities and accommodates personalization and adaptation to satisfy students' specific needs. This system employs a novel approach by incorporating engaging factors, such as interactive activities, adaptive mobile technology, social networking, and gamification to overcome the shortcoming of traditional out-of-class activities. Dysgu allows personalization to support student's study needs and adapts to student behaviors, class dynamics, and difficulty of the out-of-class activity. By having a mobile interactive learning environment, faculty will be able to facilitate learning even after the students leave the classroom and intervene early when students fall behind their peers.