Language is an act of identity, but AI has no identity other than that which its creators assign it. Technology creators who do not fully consider how identity information is encoded in AI dialogue risk creating representational harms that negatively impact users’ interactions with the technology, particularly young users from groups marginalized in STEM education. One solution is to engage young users in Participatory Design of dialogue, pushing power away from the researcher and toward the young users. This positions users as technology creators who understand AI language as a technosocial phenomenon and who have their own perspective about how identity is best portrayed in AI language. In this work in progress paper, we provide initial impressions from a Youth Advisory Group (YAG) with 12 middle-school-aged learners of color who are all female or non-binary.

Engagement is critical to learning, yet current research rarely explores its underlying contextual influences, such as differences across modalities and tasks. Accordingly we examine how patterns of behavioral engagement manifest in a diverse group of ten middle school girls participating in a synchronous virtual computer science camp. We form multimodal measures of behavioral engagement from learner chats and speech. We found that the function of modalities varies, and chats are useful for short responses, whereas speech is better for elaboration. We discuss implications of our work for the design of intelligent systems that support online educational experiences.

ABSTRACTDialog with a social pedagogical robot or agent is a powerful way for kids to learn [1, 5] but may limit the formation of an agentic relationship with the technology [9]. One main purpose of conversational agents is to allow the user to have a natural interaction that reduces the need to learn artificial conventions [6], but dialog systems fall short with respect to failure recovery, vocabulary diversity, remembering conversational history, and other measures [2, 3]. Further, Hill et. al. [4] found that people adapt their model of communication to match a chatbot’s in the same way they do with a child or non-native speaker. Thus, users conversing with a pedagogical agent are implicitly trained to shape their behavior to suit the technology rather than shaping the technology. For young learners, particularly among populations that have been historically excluded from technology fields, this limits agency and reinforces marginalizing power structures [9]. This project combines a conversational agent with ideas of agentic engagement to help middle-school-aged children learn computational thinking. Agentic engagement is defined as students’ constructive contribution into the flow of instruction and includes behaviors such as expressing interests, preferences, and opinions. It has been positively correlated to learning performance and motivation [7, 8]. Combined with a culturally responsive curriculum (CRC), agentic engagement may help to foster an agentic relationship with technology. Our system encourages learners to engage agentically by using programming constructs to change the agent’s vocabulary, recognizing the intent behind a user utterance (an invocation), and defining the action the agent will take to respond to an invocation. Students use computational thinking concepts such as pattern recognition, abstraction, and decomposition to convert ideas into commands for the dialog system and to understand which of their ideas can’t be programmed with the technology as presented. They learn both to personalize the system today and to see the agent as a technosocial construct that they can shape in the future. Programming can be accomplished either using Google’s Blockly visual programming tool (https://developers.google.com/blockly) or through conversation with the agent itself. The agent is embodied as a robot character, so agent actions can be verbal, physical, or both. Through social dialog with the agent, learners reflect on how computational thinking is relevant to themselves and their communities as part of a CRC, building on the work of Stewart et. al. [10]. For example, learners may be asked to reflect on the relationship between greeting behaviors and identity. After designing a greeting interaction, learners program the dialog system to achieve the greeting. Then learners may be asked to imagine how they might hypothetically enhance the dialog system to make it even more capable of implementing their preferences. In parallel to the development of the dialog system and curriculum, we will also adapt Reeve’s agentic engagement instrument [7] for CRC. Our contributions will include this instrument, insights into the relationship between agentic engagement and an agentic relationship with technology, and insights into how a programmable dialog system impacts agentic engagement and learning computational thinking.

The case study presented here uses an interpretivist (qualitative, humanistic) approach to illustrate and describe a range of interactions and behaviors that occur during design meetings where mentoring and design simultaneously occur within a software engineering firm, during a portion of the design phase for a software project. It attempts to examine the interaction between two design team members (one novice and one expert) and describes how these observations intersect with the theoretical and applied literature and actual design processes. Taking cues from two theoretical descriptions of the design process, the study presented here suggests that modes and models of mentorship should be added, when applicable, as a descriptive portion of the design process.

There are extremely low rates of participation by underrepresented groups (e.g. African American, Latino American, and Native American) in Computer Science. Learning to program (design and issue sequential commands to instruct a computer to solve a problem) can be challenging for many reasons and is often referred to as a large barrier to entry into the field. Novice programmers focus simultaneously on learning how to design a program, converting that design into efficient working code, and communicating their conceptual ideas towards completion. Design Recipes have been used to counter these challenges, giving beginning programmers instructional steps towards designing, programming, and testing their code. This report shares the experience of what happened when novice programmers at an HBCU (Historically Black College/University) were given a customized Design Recipe. It describes improvements regarding students' ability to design, code, test, and communicate their ideas as well as benefits related to how these outcomes can be assessed. The results of this experience contribute teaching and learning approaches towards the success of underrepresented students in programming and computer science.

Recent statistics indicate that 4.6% of Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Information in 2011 were awarded to African American college students compared to 64.8% of Bachelor of Science degrees which were awarded to Caucasian students or 15.3% to Asian students enrolled in U.S. institutions [6]. Because of the low numbers of underrepresented minorities, specifically African Americans in Computer Science, the U.S. federal government, private industries and concerned American educators seek effective measures to increase the number of African Americans in Computer Science programs across the nation. One strategic approach is to leverage African American college students’ interest in technology (e.g. testing video games) that enables them to construct computing identities in the context of serving as a technical resource to their peers [2]. As a result, many voices representing different perspectives have begun to engage in a discussion of different approaches that stimulate African American students' interest in Computer Science and how to best propel that interest into educational and career choices that increase the number of African Americans in Computer Science [1 – 5].

This paper discusses current conditions of computer science education for students of color and highlights the benefit of several successful projects in addition to Youth APPLab, a year-long winning project funded by the MacArthur Foundation‟s 2010 Digital Media & Learning Competition. With proper guidance and motivation, African-American students are motivated and engaged in learning how to become software engineers. Starting with various visual programming environments, students quickly want to advance to text-based languages. These visual tools prove to be great introductions to computer programming but do not teach core concepts. Youth APPLab instructors have observed these and other project results and will use project success to offer subsequent sessions and build and test digital and paperbased tools and other teaching aids.

In this video we describe Layered Elaboration techniques and their use in the cooperative inquiry method.

In this video we describe Energy House. Energy House is a game designed with the Cooperative Inquiry Method through the Layered Elaboration technique. Children power items in a virtual house by jumping up and down.

As technology for children becomes more mobile, social, and distributed, our design methods and techniques must evolve to better explore these new directions. This paper reports on "Layered Elaboration," a co-design technique created to support these evolving needs. .Layered Elaboration allows design teams to generate ideas through an iterative process in which each version leaves prior ideas intact while extending concepts. Layered Elaboration is a useful technique as it enables co-design to take place asynchronously and does not require much space or many resources. Our intergenerational team, including adults and children ages 7 -- 11 years old, used the technique to design both a game about history and a prototype of an instructional game about energy conservation.

We introduce a design technique, Clear Panels, to design interactive mobile device applications. Using mixed-fidelity prototyping, a combination of low- and high-tech materials, participants refine multiple aspects of a mobile application's design. Clear Panels supports writing and sketching via a transparent overlay affixed atop a mobile device screen. It enables design partners to refine their gesture-based interactions on actual devices. The technique has been successfully implemented in the design of children's mobile applications. The technique leverages and extends longstanding interaction design methods to include mobile and hand-held technologies. Importantly, we show it is effective in raising participants' awareness of key mobile application design issues without constraining their creativity.

Children want to find information about their world, but there are barriers to finding what they seek. Young people have varying abilities to formulate multi-step queries and comprehend search results. Challenges in understanding where to type, confusion about what tools are available, and frustration with how to parse the results page all have led to a lack of perceived search success for children 7-11 years old. In this paper, we describe seven search roles children display as information seekers using Internet keyword interfaces, based on a home study of 83 children ages 7, 9, and 11. These roles are defined not only by the children's search actions, but also by who influences their searching, their perceived success, and trends in age and gender. These roles suggest a need for new interfaces that expand the notion of keywords, scaffold results, and develop a search culture among children.

The goal of this paper is to bridge the gap between existing frameworks for the design of culturally relevant educational technology. Models and guidelines that provide potential frameworks for designing culturally authentic learning environment are explained and transposed into one comprehensive design framework, understanding that integrating culture into the design of educational technology promotes learning and a more authentic user experience. This framework establishes principles that promote a holistic approach to design.

Children are among the most frequent users of the Internet, yet searching and browsing the web can present many challenges. Studies over the past two decades on how children search were conducted with finite and pre-determined content found in CD-ROM applications, online digital libraries, and web directories. However, with the current popularity of the open Internet and keyword-based interfaces for searching it, more critical analysis of the challenges children face today is needed. This paper presents the findings of our initial study to understand how children ages 7, 9, and 11 search the Internet using keyword interfaces in the home. Our research has revealed that although today's children have been exposed to computers for most of their lives, spelling, typing, query formulation, and deciphering results are all still potential barriers to finding the information they need.

For more than a decade, scholars have identified culturally responsive pedagogy as a teaching method for improving the academic achievement of culturally and linguistically diverse students. Scholarly research on the intersection of culturally responsive teaching and educational technology, however, remains scant. The purpose of this literature review is to highlight research-based examples of culturally responsive applications and to provide recommendations for the design of technology-based learning environments.