Reflections on SIGCSE 2023

I had the opportunity to attend the SIGCSE 2023 conference in Toronto from March 16-18, 2023. I co-presented our paper on the Hybrid ECS for Credit Recovery experience report along with Andrew Rasmussen from CPS on behalf of the whole Hybrid ECS for credit recovery team. We also had one of our credit recovery teachers, Faythe Brannon, contribute a video of her experiences teaching the course. This was a sister session in which the best paper award winners from RESPECT 2022 were invited to present at SIGCSE. The major finding is that the through careful design, teacher recruitment, and teacher professional development we were able to create an experience in which more than 250 students were able to earn their computer science credit.

We shared the sister session with two other RESPECT 2022 paper award winners. The RESPECT 2022 Best Position paper was Liberatory Computing Education for African American Students an MIT project co-presented by Raechel Walker and Eman Sherif. The presenters shared a very interesting project where they designed a data science summer program for black youth that aligns to Dr. El-Amin’s “liberation tools.” The participants were able to use data to learn more about themselves and their community. They also got to advocate for various social issues at a local city council meeting.

@RaechelWalker 

The RESPECT 2022 Best Research paper was Teachers as Curriculum Co-designers: Supporting Professional Learning and Curriculum Implementation in a CSforAll RPP Project a SUNY Albany project presented by Gillian Bausch. The presenter shared the results of a researcher-practitioner partnership between SUNY Albany and a local school district. They used a co-design approach with middle school teachers to develop culturally responsive computing experiences for middle school students. The RPP was able to provide one on one coaching to support the co-design effort. The results indicated that the approach resulted in successful curriculum development as well as provided a model for teacher professional development.

I was able to attend other sessions at SIGCSE. One session that stood out for me was Building upon the CAPE Framework for Broader Understanding of Capacity in K-12 CS Education presented by Isabella Gransbury. This session resonated with me because we have recently published a tech report on the impact of the CPS graduation requirement and we used the CAPE framework to guide our analyses. In this paper a team of researchers expanded the Capacity dimension of CAPE to include a more detailed set of subcategories to comprise the Capacity dimension. They conducted a review of past SIGCSE conference papers to validate the framework. They have published this expanded version of the CAPE framework to a web site. We will be examining the codebook in more detail to see how it could inform our work to support computer science education in CPS.