2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With the support of the NSF Broadening Participation in Computing program, the Socially Responsible Computing (SRC) alliance is committed to transforming early computing experience to motivate and engage historically marginalized students to pursue computing. This alliance, of six public universities, collectively serves over two thousand computing students who identify as Hispanic/Latino (Latinx). Unfortunately, Latinx students face a higher attrition rate across these campuses compared to non-Latinx students (34.6% versus 21.5%), especially during the first two years of computing journey. The primary goal of our alliance is to change this trend and broaden participation in computing. Specifically, we aim to create and deploy curriculum in the early Computer Sciences courses that demonstrate the value of computing to help society, which will provide students with the opportunity to see the alignment of their communal goals with computing and opportunities to bring their own cultural assets into the computing classroom. This includes students’ community-based knowledge or skills, general communication skills, and their skills related to teamwork and community engagement. We believe this framework will foster student’s sense of belonging, motivation, and engagement in computing. To achieve our goal of improve retention of Latinx students, the alliance has set four specific objectives.

O1: Designing and bringing curricular and pedagogical changes in the two earliest computing courses that integrate considerations of social responsibility into computing assignments.

O2: Introducing a new intervention in computing courses that focuses on creating a different kind of student experience focused on community driven computing projects.

O3: Building faculty learning communities to help train, orient and support instructors of this curriculum.

O4: Employing a cross site collaboration structure using a collective impact model, allowing variance for each site while working towards a common goal

Our alliance brings together six campuses, each with unique strengths and local challenges. We use a collective impact model, allowing each campus to contribute to the development, deployment, and continuous improvement the curriculum. Our team is composed of computer science educators and social scientists with expertise in evaluating inclusive STEM education and training faculty at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). Our evaluation plan examines both student and faculty outcomes, enabling us to reflect and refine our approach. Shared leadership and site teams are integral to sustaining our work, even amid potential academic personnel changes.

Our research is impactful in the learning sciences for several reasons. It utilizes faculty learning communities as a vehicle to bring change to the climate and curriculum of computing education. Furthermore, this project holds the potential to develop a broadly applicable introductory curriculum that is designed, deployed, and evaluated across a range of public education institutions serving the diverse state of [State-Name]. We aim for the success of this alliance to extend to all other sister campuses, potentially reaching tens of thousands of computing students. This curriculum will also be broadly deployed nationwide to help marginalized students pursue computing.

Despite being in the initial year of the project, we have achieved significant results in terms of instructor skill gains and attitudes. We are poised to make a meaningful impact on students as we have begun introducing new curricular and pedagogical changes. In this paper, we will share our current progress and core activities related to each objective, which include establishing a supportive alliance structure, developing new computing curriculum that includes a socially responsible component at each site, creating the structure and content for the first faculty learning community (FLC), and implementing the collective impact model. In addition, we will also share survey data, including feedback from both students and instructors, and lessons learned during the first-year implementation.