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Codewit.us: A Platform for Diverse Perspectives in Coding

Published: 22 February 2022 Publication History

Abstract

To broaden participation in computing, learning materials should relate to a diverse spectrum of student perspectives. This paper introduces Codewit.us, an online platform for under-represented minority (URM) students in computing to share examples of how coding fundamentals can be demonstrated in contexts relevant to their own lives. Codewit.us features brief video demonstrations by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and female students, paired with interactive drill-and-practice coding problems on matching programming concepts.
This experience report describes the software and pedagogical design for Codewit.us. The report includes preliminary findings from our investigation into the diversity of students' interests, usage of Codewit.us videos and practice problems, as well as students' affect and self-efficacy. A needs assessment found significant differences in certain interests associated with students' gender. Preliminary findings indicated greater improvements in students' affective outcomes in a course offering with the Codewit.us learning materials than in courses without them. The paper also discusses opportunities discovered for broadening participation in CS by relating coding to new perspectives seldom represented in introductory programming courses.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE 2022: Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 1
February 2022
1049 pages
ISBN:9781450390705
DOI:10.1145/3478431
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 22 February 2022

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Author Tags

  1. broadening participation
  2. coding
  3. drill-and-practice
  4. gender
  5. problets
  6. race
  7. self-efficacy
  8. under-represented minorities (urm)
  9. video tutorial

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