Student Engagement is Key to Broadening Participation in CS

The Mobile CS Principles (Mobile CSP) course is one of the NSF-supported, College Board-endorsed curricula for the new Computer Science Principles AP course. Since 2013, the Mobile CSP project has trained more than 700 teachers, and the course has been offered to more than 20,000 students throughout the United States. The organizing philosophy behind the Mobile CSP course is that student engagement in the classroom is the key to getting students, especially those traditionally underrepresented in CS, interested in pursuing further study and careers in CS. The main strategies used to engage Mobile CSP students are: (1) a focus on mobile computing throughout the course, taking advantage of current student interest in smartphones; (2) an emphasis on getting students building mobile apps from day one, by utilizing the highly accessible App Inventor programming language; and (3) an emphasis on building creative, 'socially useful' apps to get students thinking about ways that computing can help their communities. In this paper we present and summarize two years of data of various types (i.e., student surveys, teacher surveys, objective assessments, and anecdotal reports from students and teachers) to support the hypothesis that engagement of the sort practiced in the Mobile CSP course not only helps broaden participation in CS among hard-to-reach demographics, but also provides them with a solid grounding in computer science principles and practices.