Engaging 4th and 5th Grade Students with Cultural Pedagogy in Introductory Programming

The computing education community has explored multiple strategies to address the problem of underrepresentation of African American and Latino students. Recently, the community has started to explore culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) to increase the effectiveness of curricula and programs designed to increase participation in underrepresented groups. CRP suggests that the use of culture can benefit students by providing them with opportunities to bring their culture into learning. In this poster paper, we explore the use of CRP to introduce 4th and 5th grade African American students to computer science in an 8-week summer camp through the context of social justice.