Computational literacy, language, and culture

Computational literacies are becoming increasingly necessary for full societal participation. This paper investigates how Latine and multilingual students leverage their linguistic and cultural resources to develop coding and literacy skills. Data included interviews with Latine and multilingual students, teacher interviews, and teacher co-design meeting notes. Results showed that students learned coding and language through their families and communities, leveraged their cultural knowledge of storytelling to engage in computing, and built self-efficacy through peer support. Findings from this pilot study shed light on how to mobilize Latine and multilingual students’ rich languages and cultures for equitable computer science learning.

I. Introduction

Computational literacies are becoming increasingly necessary for full participation in today’s society [1], [2], [3]. We borrow from [3] definition of computational literacy, which itself draws from the works of [2], [4], [5], to define computational literacies as "a set of practices situated in a sociocultural context which utilize external computational media to support cognition and communication" (pp. 1 48-149). Despite the growing interest in computational literacies, there have only been a few empirical studies on computational literacies to date [5], [6], [7], and little research considers the cultural and linguistic factors that shape diverse students' development of computational literacies.