"Exactly Who All Is CS4?" Ask Bootstrap's Co-Directors
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on April 15, 2016
"We want to bring computing to all, but which all do we mean?" ask Kathi Fisler, Shriram Krishnamurthi, and Emmanuel Schanzer, co-directors of Bootstrap, one of the nation's leading computer science literacy programs, in a recent BLOG@CACM post. "There’s one natural interpretation —probably the one imagined by most of the general public— which is that 'all' means 'all students.' Unfortunately, there is another interpretation, which is explicit in some cases and implicit in others: 'all schools.'....The difference between these two targets is vast, and conflating them will have serious impacts on our field and the students we serve."
By focusing on differently-abled users and evaluating differences between access and exposure (what if coding clubs are created in every school, but each club only has two participants?), the authors conclude that if we want CS for all students, we need to solve for equity and scale.
The entire blog post is available here.