Disrupting Computing Education: Teen-Led Participatory Design in Libraries

Large-scale disparities in computing exist for many youth of color. Learning in informal settings can increase the participation of youth in computing; however, computing education programs have typically been developed by adults for youth. We argue computing education can contribute toward decolonization by directly involving youth from nondominant communities as design partners. When we directly involve youth voices, we can move away from focusing solely on the structural barriers faced by youth of color toward an assets-based approach. We examine a 10-week case study within KidsTeam Libraries, an intergenerational digital design program where local youth conceptualize what digital learning could look like in libraries. Our qualitative dataset includes over 15 hours of video recordings from participatory design sessions, six interviews with participants, 10 researcher jottings, and a corpus of 25 researcher memos written by researchers, librarians, and teens. Throughout our investigation, our knowledge claims are co-constructed with the two teenagers who led the design and implementation of a three-dimensional printing curriculum in their local library with 10 children. Our findings emphasize (1) the ways in which the involvement of teen leaders can foster and sustain community-level relationships for computing education; (2) how we noticed, enforced, and disrupted power within our computing education program; and (3) the systemic challenges we confronted in our process toward disrupting computing education. We provide empirical evidence of teen-led participatory design approaches for computing education in their community through detailed vignettes from sessions and through quotes from key participants. We contribute to the computing education community a novel approach in which youth are positioned as design partners for reimagining a computing education experience in libraries that centers and serves community members.