In order to improve the diversity of the computer science field, both educators and professionals need to be aware of the issues. Because students are the future professionals in our discipline, educators must make them aware of issues surrounding accessibility and inclusion.
Educators are looking for the most effective methods to raise awareness among students. Some approaches have designed isolated modules within computing courses [3] or single assignments within courses [4]. Others have focused on requiring courses outside the computer science major focused on diversity and social issues. This has been shown to have a positive impact on students’ moral development [2] but may not encourage students to make direct connections to the computer science field. Evidence suggests that students experience the maximum impact when they receive repeated exposure to these issues over a longer time period [1].
Our work builds on this idea and seeks to provide repeated exposure to social issues within the computer science discipline by including assignments at all levels of the curriculum. By including assignments within many course contexts, students will be exposed to multiple aspects of diversity, be encouraged to reflect on social issues, and become more comfortable having conversations about inequalities.
We have created a modest repository of assignments that raise awareness about issues of diversity, inclusion, and accessibility and invite student reflection and discussion. We will share assignments that can be integrated into common courses such as CS0/CS1 and discrete mathematics. We will also provide a link to our repository, which includes additional assignments that could be used in introductory courses or in upper-level computer science courses such as web development, human computer interaction, and software engineering.
We encourage educators in our community to not only utilize and adapt our assignments for your courses, but also contribute assignments of your own design.
[1] Bartilla, A. and Köppe, C. 2015. Awareness seeds for more gender diversity in computer science education. In Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (EuroPLoP '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 37, 1–11. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2855321.2855359
[2] Parker, E., Barnhardt, C., Pascarella, E., and McCowin, J. 2016. The Impact of Diversity Courses on College Students’ Moral Development. Journal of College Student Development. 57. 395-410. DOI:10.1353/csd.2016.0050.
[3] Rößling, G. and Broj, F. 2018. An interactive online course to raise awareness about diversity. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2018). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 377. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3197091.3205809.
[4] Wick, M. R. 2009. Using programming to help students understand the value of diversity. SIGCSE Bull. 41, 1 (March 2009), 367–371. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/1539024.1508997.