Culturally Informed Advanced CS Principles: Rigorous, Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Computer Science Education.

The Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles (AP CSP) curriculum framework has been in use since 2016. The AP CSP framework has leveraged the use of computational thinking skills to scaffold students into understanding a variety of computing topics spread throughout the content of the curriculum. This Lightning Talk explores ideas for future work with high school AP CSP teachers in developing culturally relevant and sustaining (CR-S) curriculum to strengthen the efforts of broadening participation among Black, Indigenous, and other students of color in AP CSP courses. To do this, this work approaches culturally relevant and sustaining computing strategies as valuable tools to integrate into the AP CSP curriculum, classroom environments, and teachers' pedagogical approaches. This work looks to the Ghanaian practices of adinkra cloth making as a computationally rich cultural practice that can support student learning. The history and cultural practices surrounding Adinkra reveal richly developed, embedded mathematical and algorithmic knowledge, that is relevant to several AP CSP units. The talk described here explains how Adinkra artisans use ?heritage algorithms" to accomplish the task of creating adinkra cloth. Framing the adinkra process this way has implications for teaching and learning computing as well as broadening participation.