The three panelists provided a stimulating discussion of some key issues in supporting young people in low-income areas in the UK, USA, and Guyana to engage with computing, and we hope their insights are of use to educators, youth workers, and organisations around the world.

The panellists and their perspectives

Our panellists represent three different countries, and all have experience of teaching in schools and/or working with young people outside of the formal education system. Because of the differences between countries in terms of access to computing, having this spread of expertise and contexts allowed the panelists to compare lessons learned in different sectors and locations.

Panelist Lenandlar Singh is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Guyana. In Guyana, there is a range of computing-related courses for high school students, and access to optional qualifications in computer science at A level (age 17–18).

Panelist Yolanda Payne is a Research Associate at the Constellations Center at Georgia Tech, USA. In the US, computing curricula differ across states, although there is some national leadership through associations, centres, and corporations.

Christina Watson is Assistant Director of Design at UK Youth*, UK. The UK has a mandatory computing curriculum for learners aged 5–18, although curricula vary across the four home nations (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland).

As the moderator, I posed the following three questions, which the panelists answered from their own perspectives and experiences:

• What are the key challenges for young people to engage with computing in or out of school, and what have you done to overcome these challenges?
• What do you see as the role of formal and non-formal learning opportunities in computing for these young people?
• What have you learned that could help other people working with these young people and their communities in the future?

Similarities across contexts

One of the aspects of the discussion that really stood out was the number of similarities across the panellists’ different contexts. 

The first of these similarities was the lack of access to computing amongst young people from low-income families, particularly in more rural areas, across all three countries. These access issues concerned devices and digital infrastructure, but also the types of opportunities in and out of school that young people were able to engage with.

Christina (UK) shared results from a survey conducted with Aik Saath, a youth organisation in the UK Youth network (see graphs below). The results highlighted that very few young people in low-income areas had access to their own device for online learning, and mostly their access was to a smartphone or tablet rather than a computer. She pointed out that youth organisations can struggle to provide access to computing not only due to lack of funding, but also because they don’t have secure spaces in which to store equipment.

Lenandlar (Guyana) and Christina (UK) also discussed the need to improve the digital skills and confidence of teachers and youth workers so they can support young people with their computing education. While Lenandlar spoke about recruitment and training of qualified computing teachers in Guyana, Christina suggested that it was less important for youth workers in the UK to become experts in the field and more important for them to feel empowered and confident in supporting young people to explore computing and understand different career paths. UK Youth found that partnering with organisations that provided technical expertise (such as us at the Raspberry Pi Foundation) allowed youth workers to focus on the broader support that the young people needed.

Both Yolanda (US) and Lenandlar (Guyana) discussed the restrictive nature of the computing curriculum in schools, agreeing with Christina (UK) that outside of the classroom, there was more freedom for young people to explore different aspects of computing. All three agreed that introducing more fun and relevant activities into the curriculum made young people excited about computing and reduced stereotypes and misconceptions about the discipline and career. Yolanda explained that using modern, real-life examples and role models was a key part of connecting with young people and engaging them in computing.

What can teachers do to support young people and their families?

Yolanda (US) advocated strongly for listening to students and their communities to help understand what is meaningful and relevant to them. One example of this approach is to help young people and their families understand the economics of technology, and how computing can be used to support, develop, and sustain businesses and employment in their community. As society has become more reliant on computing and technology, this can translate into real economic impact.

Both Yolanda (US) and Lenandlar (Guyana) emphasised the importance of providing opportunities for digital making, allowing students opportunities to become creators rather than just consumers of technology. They also highly recommended providing relevant contexts for computing and identifying links with different careers.

The panellists also discussed the importance of partnering with other education settings, with tech companies, and with non-profit organisations to provide access to equipment and opportunities for students in schools that have limited budgets and capacity for computing. These links can also highlight key role models and help to build strong relationships in the community between businesses and schools.

What is the role of non-formal settings in low-income areas?

All of the panellists agreed that non-formal settings provided opportunities for further exploration and skill development outside of a strict curriculum. Christina (UK) particularly highlighted that these settings helped support young people and families who feel left behind by the education system, allowing them to develop practical skills and knowledge that can help their whole family. She emphasised the strong relationships that can be developed in these settings and how these can provide relatable role models for young people in low-income areas.

Tips and suggestions

After the presentation, the panelists responded to the audience’s questions with some practical tips and suggestions for engaging young people in low-income communities with computing:

How do you engage young people who are non-native English speakers with mainly English computing materials?

• For curriculum materials, it’s possible to use Google Translate to allow students to access them. The software is not always totally accurate but goes some way to supporting these students. You can also try to use videos that have captioning and options for non-English subtitles.
• We offer translated versions of our free online projects, thanks to a community of dedicated volunteer translators from around the world. Learners can choose from up to 30 languages (as shown in the picture below).

How do you set up partnerships with other organisations?

• Follow companies on social media and share how you are using their products or tools, and how you are aligned with their goals. This can form the basis of future partnerships.
• When you are actively applying for partnerships, consider the following points:
  • What evidence do you have that you need support from the potential partner?
  • What support are you asking for? This may differ across potential partners, so make sure your pitch is relevant and tailored to a specific partner.
  • What evidence could you use to show the impact you are already having or previous successful projects or partnerships?

Make use of our free training resources and guides

For anyone wishing to learn computing knowledge and skills, and the skills you need to teach young people in and out of school about these topics, we provide a wide range of free online training courses to cover all your needs. Educators in England can also access the free CPD that we and our consortium partners offer through the National Centre for Computing Education.

To help you support your learners in and out of school to engage with computing in ways that are meaningful and relevant for them, we recently published a guide on culturally relevant teaching.

We also support a worldwide network of volunteers to run CoderDojos, which are coding clubs for young people in local community spaces. Head over to the CoderDojo website to discover more about the free materials and help we’ve got for you.

We would like to thank our panellists Lenandlar Singh, Yolanda Payne, and Christina Watson for sharing their time and expertise, and the Tapia conference organisers for providing a great platform to discuss issues of diversity, equality, and inclusion in computing.

*UK Youth is a leading charity working across the UK with an open network of over 8000 youth organisations. The charity has influence as a sector-supporting infrastructure body, a direct delivery partner, and a campaigner for social change.

The post Perspectives on supporting young people in low-income areas to access and engage with computing appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

This month we welcomed Dr Maya Israel, who heads the Creative Technology Research Lab at the University of Florida. She spoke to us about designing inclusive learning experiences in computer science (CS) that cater for learners with a wide range of educational needs.

Underrepresentation of computer science students with additional needs

Maya introduced her work by explaining that the primary goal of her research is to “increase access to CS education for students with disabilities and others at risk for academic failure”. To illustrate this, she shared some preliminary findings (paper in preparation) from the analysis of data from one US school district.

Her results showed that only around 22–25% of elementary school students with additional needs (including students with learning disabilities, speech or language impairments, emotional disturbances, or learners on the autistic spectrum) accessed CS classes. Even more worryingly, by high school only 5–7% of students with additional needs accessed CS classes (for students on the autistic spectrum the decline in access was less steep, to around 12%).

Maya made the important point that many educators and school leaders may ascribe this lack of representation to students’ disabilities being a barrier to success, rather than to the design of curricula and instruction methods being a barrier to these students accessing and succeeding in CS education.

What barriers to inclusion are there for students with additional needs?

Maya detailed the systems approach she uses in her work to think about external barriers to inclusion in CS education:

• At the classroom level — such as teachers’ understanding of learner variability and instructional approaches
• At the school level — perhaps CS classes clash with additional classes that the learner requires for extra support with other subjects
• At the systemic level — whether the tools and curricula in use are accessible

As an example, Maya pointed out that many of the programming platforms used in CS education are not fully accessible to all learners; each platform has unique accessibility issues.

This is not to say that students with additional needs have no internal barriers to succeeding in CS (these may include difficulties with understanding code, debugging, planning, and dealing with frustration). Maya told us about a study in which the researchers used the Collaborative Computing Observation Instrument (C-COI), which allows analysis of video footage recorded during collaborative programming exercises to identify student challenges and strategies. The study found various strategies for debugging and highlighted a particular need for supporting students in transitioning from a trial-and-error approach to more systematic testing. The C-COI has a lot of potential for understanding student-level barriers to learning, and it will also be able to give insight into the external barriers to inclusion.

Pathways to inclusion

Maya’s work has focused not only on identifying the problems with access, it also aims to develop solutions, which she terms pathways to inclusion. A standard approach to inclusion might involve designing curricula for the ‘average’ learner and then differentiating work for learners with additional needs. What is new and exciting about Maya’s approach is that it is based on the premise that there is no such person as an average learner, and rather that all learners have jagged profiles of strengths and weaknesses that contribute to their level of academic success.

In the seminar, Maya described ways in which CS curricula can be designed to be flexible and take into account the variability of all learners. To do this, she has been using the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach, adapting it specifically for CS and testing it in the classroom.

Why is Universal Design for Learning useful?

The UDL approach helps educators anticipate barriers to learning and plan activities to overcome them by focusing on providing different means of engagement, representation, and expression for learners in each lesson. Different types of activities are suggested to address each of these three areas. Maya and her team have adapted the general principles of UDL to a CS-specific context, providing teachers with clear checkpoints to consider when designing computing lessons; you can read more on this in this recent Hello World article.

A practical UDL example Maya shared with us was using a series of scaffolded Scratch projects based on the ‘Use-Modify-Create’ approach. Students begin by playing and remixing code; then they try to debug the same program when it is not working; then they reconstruct code that has been deconstructed for the same program; and then finally, they try to expand the program to make the Scratch sprite do something of their choosing. All four Scratch project versions are available at the same time, so students can toggle between them as they learn. This helps them work more independently by reducing cognitive load and providing a range of scaffolded support.

This example illustrates that, by designing activities that support students with additional educational needs, we can improve the understanding and proficiency of all of our students.

Training teachers to support CS students with additional needs

Maya identified three groups of teachers who can benefit from training in either UDL or in supporting students with additional needs in CS:

1. Special Education teachers who have knowledge of instructional strategies for students with additional needs but little experience/subject knowledge of computing
2. Computing teachers who have subject knowledge but little experience of Special Education strategies
3. Teachers who are new to computing and have little experience of Special Education

Maya and her team conducted research with all three of these teacher groups, where they provided professional development for the teachers with the aim to understand what elements of the training were most useful and important for teachers’ confidence and practice in supporting students with additional needs in CS. In this research project, they found that for the teachers, a key aspect of the training was having time to identify and discuss the barriers/challenges their students face, as well as potential strategies to overcome these. This process is a core element of the UDL approach, and may be very different to the standard method of planning lessons that teachers are used to.

Another study by Maya’s team showed that an understanding of UDL in the context of CS was a key predictor of teacher confidence in teaching CS to students with additional needs (along with the number years spent teaching CS, and general confidence in teaching CS). Maya therefore believes that focusing on teachers’ understanding of the UDL approach and how they can apply it in CS will be the most important part of their future professional development training.

Final thoughts

Maya talked to us about the importance of intersectionality in supporting students who are learning CS, which aligns with a previous seminar given by Jakita O. Thomas. Specifically, Maya identified that UDL should fit into a wider approach of Intersectional Inclusive Computer Science Education, which encompasses UDL, culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy, and translanguaging pedagogy/multilingual education. We hope to learn more about this topic area in upcoming seminars in our current series.

You can download Maya’s presentation slides now, and watch the seminar recording here:

Attend the next online research seminar

The next seminar in the diversity and inclusion series will take place on Tuesday 4 May at 17:00–18:30 BST / 12:00–13:30 EDT / 9:00–10:30 PDT / 18:00–19:30 CEST. You’ll hear from Dr Cecily Morrison (Microsoft Research) about her research into computing for learners with visual impairments.

To join this free event, click below and sign up with your name and email address:

We’ll send you the link and instructions. See you there!

This was our 15th research seminar — you can find all the related blog posts here.

The post How can we design inclusive and accessible curricula for computer science? appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework for considering how tools and resources can be used to reduce barriers and support all learners. Based on findings from neuroscience, it has been developed over the last 30 years by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), a nonprofit education research and development organisation based in the US. UDL is currently used across the globe, with research showing it can be an efficient approach for designing flexible learning environments and accessible content.

Engaging a wider range of learners is an important issue in computer science, which is often not chosen as an optional subject by girls and those from some minority ethnic groups. Researchers at the Creative Technology Research Lab in the US have been investigating how UDL principles can be applied to computer science, to improve learning and engagement for all students. They have adapted the UDL guidelines to a computer science education context and begun to explore how teachers use the framework in their own practice. The hope is that understanding and adapting how the subject is taught could help to increase the representation of all groups in computing.

A scientific approach

The UDL framework is based on neuroscientific evidence which highlights how different areas or networks in the brain work together to process information during learning. Importantly, there is variation across individuals in how each of these networks functions and how they interact with each other. This means that a traditional approach to teaching, in which a main task is differentiated for certain students with special educational needs, may miss out on the variation in learning between all students across different tasks.

The UDL guidelines highlight different opportunities to take learner differences into account when planning lessons. The framework is structured according to three main principles, which are directly related to three networks in the brain that play a central role in learning. It encourages educators to plan multiple, flexible methods of engagement in learning (affective networks), representation of the teaching materials (recognition networks), and opportunities for action and expression of what has been learnt (strategic networks).

The three principles of UDL are each expanded into guidelines and checkpoints that allow educators to identify the different methods of engagement, representation, and expression to be used in a particular lesson. Each principle is also broken down into activities that allow learners to access the learning goals, remain engaged and build on their learning, and begin to internalise the approaches to learning so that they are empowered for the future.

Examples of UDL guidelines for computer science education from the Creative Technology Research Lab

Each principle of the UDL framework is associated with three areas of activity which may be considered when planning lessons or units of work. It will not be the case that each area of activity should be covered in every lesson, and some may prove more important in particular contexts than others. The full table and explanation can be found on the Creative Technology Research Lab website at ctrl.education.ufl.edu/projects/tactic.

Applying UDL to computer science education

While an advantage of UDL is that the principles can be applied across different subjects, it is important to think carefully about what activities to address these principles could look like in the case of computer science.

Researchers at the Creative Technology Research Lab, led by Maya Israel, have identified key activities, some of which are presented in the table on the previous page. These guidelines will help educators anticipate potential barriers to learning and plan activities that can overcome them, or adapt activities from those in existing schemes of work, to help engage the widest possible range of students in the lesson.

UDL in the classroom

As well as suggesting approaches to applying UDL to computer science education, the research team at the Creative Technology Research Lab has also investigated how teachers are using UDL in practice. Israel and colleagues worked with four novice computer science teachers in US elementary schools to train them in the use of UDL and understand how they applied the framework in their teaching.

The research found that the teachers were most likely to include in their teaching multiple means of engagement, followed by multiple methods of representation. For example, they all offered choice in their students’ activities and provided materials in different formats (such as oral and visual presentations and demonstrations). They were less likely to provide multiple means of action and expression, and mainly addressed this principle through supporting students in planning work and checking their progress against their goals.

Although the study included only four teachers, it highlighted the flexibility of the UDL approach in catering for different needs within variable teaching contexts. More research will be needed in future, with larger samples, to understand how successful the approach is in helping a wide range of students to achieve good learning outcomes.

Find out more about using UDL

There are numerous resources designed to help teachers learn more about the UDL framework and how to apply it to teaching computing. The CAST website (helloworld.cc/cast) includes an explainer video and the detailed UDL guidelines. The Creative Technology Research Lab website has computing-specific ideas and lesson plans using UDL (helloworld.cc/udl).

Maya Israel will be presenting her research at our computing education research seminar series, on 20 April 2021. Our seminars are free to attend and open to anyone from anywhere around the world. Find out more about the current seminar series, which focuses on diversity and inclusion in computing education.

Further reading on UDL

• Israel, M., Lash, T., & Jeong, G. (2017). Utilizing the Universal Design for Learning Framework in K-12 Computer Science Education. Project TACTIC: Teaching All Computational Thinking Through Inclusion and Collaboration
• Israel, M., Jeong, G., Ray, M., & Lash, T. (2020). Teaching Elementary Computer Science Through Universal Design for Learning. Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, pp. 1220-1226. dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3328778.3366823
• Rose, D. H. & Strangman, N. (2007). Universal design for learning: Meeting the challenge of individual learning differences through a neurocognitive perspective. Universal Access in the Information Society, 5(4), pp. 381-391. dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1007/s10209-006-0062-8

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In issue 15 of Hello World, we hear from five teachers who have made the switch to computing from another subject. They tell us about the challenges they have faced, as well as the joys of teaching young people how to create new things with technology. All this and much, much more in the new issue!

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