Race and gender in play practices: young African American males

In this paper we present a study with young African American men, to gain a better understanding of the impacts of cultural and gender identity on play practices and to explore the relationship between cultural play practices and interest in computing. Our findings indicate that while young African American men play video games frequently, their objectives in playing may be unlike those who enter computer scientist fields. From this we discuss implications of this study on designing CS learning interventions that leverage video games to introduce young people to computation.

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