There are currently too few computer science faculty to meet student demand, and faculty from historically minoritized groups are severely underrepresented. Expanding pathways from community colleges to PhDs is one critical avenue to both grow and diversify the computer science professoriate that has been underexplored. To gain insight into these…

Block-based programming languages (BBLs) have been proposed as a way to prepare students for learning to program in more sophisticated, text-based languages, such as Java. Hybrid BBLs add the ability to view and edit the block commands in auto-generated, text-based code. We compared the use of a non-hybrid BBL (Scratch), a hybrid BBL (Pencil…

As open-access institutions serving diverse student populations, community colleges are perfect settings for broadening participation in computing efforts in higher education. The very nature of open access, however, places students with a wide variety of previous experience in the same introductory computer science classroom, intimidating the…

Background and Context: Differences in children's and adolescents' initial attitudes about computing and other STEM fields may form during middle school and shape decisions leading to career entry. Early emerging differences in career interest may propagate a lack of diversity in computer science and programming fields. Objective: Though middle…

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Computer Science and STEM-related fields were among the most resistant to online courses. This is because of a perception of the need for more hands-on instruction with labs, clinicals, field studies, etc. Additionally, many STEM students had perceptions based on limited experience of an online STEM course.…

Over the last decade the Bay Area region has witnessed a lack of diversity in Silicon Valley technology professions, a subject of current political and popular discourse. The California State University (CSU) system provides accessible higher education; the CSU system approach to accessible higher education affirms the distinctness of regions,…

Culturally responsive computing (CRC), that centers sociopolitical issues and transformational uses of technology, has been described as valuable for increasing engagement with computing, especially for historically underrepresented minoritized students. But what do high school students think? Through a sociocultural lens prioritizing student…

The development of student identities--their interests in computer science, perceptions of the discipline, and sense of belonging in the field--is critical for broadening participation of underrepresented groups in computing. This paper reports on the design of portfolios in which two classes of high school students reflected on the process of…

Background and Context: Non-traditional training grounds such as coding boot camps that attract a higher proportion of women are important sites for understanding how to broaden participation in computing. Objective: This work aims to help us better understand the women choosing boot camps and their pathways through these camps and into the…

The positive influence of active learning methods for Higher Education is widely studied and is well documented in the research literature. However, there is very little research on active learning impact on Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) accredited business programs which include a Science, Technology, Engineering,…

Background and Context: Pair programming is used in classrooms to promote learning and engage a more diverse group of students in computing fields, but little is known about what it looks like in middle school. Objective: The aim of this study was to examine how programming pairs were interacting and about what. Method: Video, audio, and screen…

In 2019, California State University (CSU), Chico was awarded a five-year Teaching Quality Partnership (TQP) grant to implement the Computational Literacy Across Secondary Settings (CLASS) program. The goal of this program was to recruit, prepare, and retain highly qualified individuals into the teaching profession, with a focus on high-need rural…

We developed the Draw-A-Computer-Scientist-Test (DACST) to better understand elementary school students' conceptions of computer scientists and the nature of their work. By understanding how young children perceive computer scientists, we can broaden their ideas about the activities and images of computer scientists. We administered the DACST to…

Experience is necessary but not sufficient to cause girls to envision a future career in computing. This study investigated the experiences and attitudes of girls who had taken three years of mandatory computer science classes in an all-girls setting in middle school, measured at the end of eighth grade. The one third of participants who were open…

Peer Instruction (PI) is an active learning pedagogical technique. PI lectures present students with a series of multiple-choice questions, which they respond to both individually and in groups. PI has been widely successful in the physical sciences and, recently, has been successfully adopted by computer science instructors in lower-division,…