Introducing Computational Thinking in Middle-Schools using a Culturally-responsive Game through a Researcher-Practitioner Partnership

There is a national need to increase the number of minority students entering STEM fields with essential computing skills. To increase minority students’ interest and engagement in computing, a researcher-practitioner partnership between the University of Texas at El Paso and the El Paso Independent School District, developed and implemented a culturally and linguistically responsive curriculum and pedagogy to introduce computational thinking (CT) in two middle schools across different subject areas in a borderland region. The curriculum leveraged the Sol y Agua game – a bilingual, culturally-responsive game designed to engage students of this region in CT. This paper describes the process and initial findings of this project. The quantitative data from in-game analyses show that students utilized the language change feature to switch from English to Spanish more frequently than the other way – highlighting the need for educational platforms relatable to students through language, environment, and cultural context. Analyses of the qualitative data indicate that while teachers/team members understood CT and translanguaging concepts and taught lesson units that provided opportunities to practice both, CT and translanguaging were largely implicit in the curriculum. In collaborative analyses of these patterns, teachers described additional supports that would help them to make CT instruction and translanguaging strategies more explicit in the content and pedagogy, highlighting the need for systematic, targeted integration of these concepts.