The purpose of this study was to address issues of potential gender bias in pre-service elementary teachers' conceptions of engineers and engineering using Freire's (2018) "Critical Consciousness" perspective. By identifying the biasness as causal and structural attributions, the study also aimed to construct a critical pedagogy…

In this manuscript, we describe a coding club we created and implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. We were purposeful in creating the club to: (a) focus on design and problem solving as the basis for learning computer coding and (b) include elements to improve the engagement of girls. We ran multiple iterations of a Girls Design with Code Club…

This study explored the interest, outcome expectations, choice goals and choice actions in engineering and technology, collaboration value, problem solving attitudes, and spatial reasoning and orientation skills of 63 middle school females in grades six, seven, and eight. The participants were involved in a five full-day coding robotics summer…

We examine three coding bootcamps offered by LaunchCode (LC101, Women+, and CodeCamp) to understand if tailored structures within coding bootcamp programs--designed for underrepresented groups in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM)--lead to increased program persistence for women, underrepresented minorities, and low-income…

Computing fields are foundational to most STEM disciplines and the only STEM discipline to show a consistent decline in women's representation since 1990, making it an important field for STEM educators to study. The explanation for the underrepresentation of women and girls in computing is twofold: a sense that they do not fit within the…

Female-focused, grassroots communities purporting to help women learn to code are popping up in a variety of settings, indicating the motivation on the part of the participants to evade male-dominated settings while learning. However, little is known about how these groups function as an activity system. With current technology enabling the…

Background and Context: A continued gender disparity has driven a need for effective interventions for recruiting girls to computer science. Prior research has demonstrated that middle school girls hold beliefs and attitudes that keep them from learning computer science, which can be mitigated through classroom design. Objective: This study…

This mixed methods study examines the creativity of Black girls as they learned to code virtual environments in an afterschool program. The afterschool program, West Philly Tech Camp/Black Girls in Computing was a nine-week program in which students learned to code a virtual chatbot using Python. The program's design was guided by culturally…

College-educated women in the workforce are discovering a latent interest in and aptitude for computing motivated by the prevalence of computing as an integral part of jobs in many fields as well as continued headlines about the number of unfilled, highly paid computing jobs. One of these women's choices for retraining are the so-called coding…

Aiming to promote equity in computing, this study proposes an educational model that offers an alternative approach to inspire K-12 students to become interested in CS and develop their computational thinking (CT) skills. It also examines the experience of marginalized students during the COVID pandemic in a learning environment grounded in the…

The American Institutes for Research® (AIR®) partnered with Girls Who Code (GWC) to conduct an independent study evaluating the effectiveness of two GWC summer virtual programs, the Summer Immersion Program (SIP) and the Self-Paced Program (SPP), on promoting the pursuit of Computer Science (CS)-related postsecondary education for high school…

Students from underrepresented populations--females, working class, and youth from marginalized racial/ethnic groups--are less likely than their middle-class Asian and White male peers to study computer science (CS) in college. The dearth of CS undergraduates from these groups contributes to projected labor force shortages. Sources of the dilemma…

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…

Increasing the inclusion of underrepresented individuals in coding is an intractable problem, with a variety of initiatives trying to improve the situation. Many of these initiatives involve STEAM education, which combines the arts with traditional STEM disciplines. Evidence is emerging that this approach is making headway on this complex problem.…

This paper is a content analysis of political flyers and messages developed by Religious Right campaigns between 1974 and 2013 to fight legislation supportive of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals. The analysis focuses on 16 campaigns in which Religious Right groups made claims about transgender adults and children. In…