Research on MWC

"Growing as a person": Developing Identity and Agency Across Formal CS Education and Everyday Computing Contexts

Wolf, J., Han, J., Proctor, C., Brown, E., Pang, J., & Blikstein, P. (2023). “Growing as a person”: Developing Identity and Agency Across Formal CS Education and Everyday Computing Contexts. In Building knowledge and sustaining our community, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning - CSCL 2023. Montreal, Canada: International Society of the Learning Sciences. Download

To understand how learners develop identities in computer science (CS), we must investigate learners’ experiences with computing throughout their lives. Drawing from a theory of learning as participation in communities of practice, we analyze interviews with high school students at the end of their time in a 2-year, constructionist CS course to better understand how these students’ CS education affected their experiences with computing in their everyday lives. We identify moments where students begin to “re-see” technology which offer insight into how students author their computational identities. However, our analysis reveals that re-seeing does not inevitably align with a positive trajectory of participation in CS. Instead, we discuss how the nuances of students’ “re-seeing” experiences combine with various social factors to influence students’ computational identity authorship.

Recovering Constructionism in computer science: Design of a ninth-grade introductory computer science course

Proctor, C., Han, J., Wolf, J., Ng, K., & Blikstein, P. (2020). Recovering Constructionism in computer science: Design of a ninth-grade introductory computer science course. In B. Tangney, J. Rowan Byrne, & C. Girvan (Eds.) Proceedings of the 2020 Constructionism Conference. (pp. 473-481). Dublin, Ireland: University of Dublin. Download

Constructionism provided an early justification for children to study computers, but today’s dominant approaches to K-12 computer science education are vulnerable to some of the same critiques Papert (1980) made of traditional schooling. In this paper, we identify three themes of Constructionism (computing cultures, material intelligence, and liberatory pedagogy) and use them to analyze existing approaches to K-12 computer science education. We then use these themes as design goals for a Constructionist ninth-grade introductory computer science course which is currently being implemented. This paper is part of a larger research project whose goal is to demonstrate the feasibility of a course focused on fully realizing the ambitious epistemological goals of Constructionism. As we contribute to a vision for K-12 computer science education, we hope to help recover the central role of Constructionism.