Using App Inventor & History as a Gateway to Engage African American Students in Computer Science Yerika Jimenez Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering University of Florida Gainesville, Florida Christina Gardner-McCune Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering University of Florida Gainesville, Florida Abstract— Unlike enrollment in undergraduate computer science degree programs, there are no gender or ethnic imbalances in K-12 enrollment. While such disparities are seen at particular schools, such disparities do not exist in disciplinary courses such as history, math, or science where all students are required to take these courses. This paper discusses an approach to broaden minority participation in computing through the integration of Computer Science (CS) into a history course. This poster proposes an alignment between computational thinking and historical thinking that makes history courses an attractive fit for CS integration. It also presents results from the pilot study of a project- based cross-disciplinary curriculum using MIT App inventor that leverages students’ interests in mobile technology to facilitate the creation of historical mobile apps. This curricular approach is built on a theoretical framework rooted in Constructivist and Constructionist learning where students construct and produce knowledge, artifacts, and technology rather than consume them. Our initial results suggest that students were engaged in the material and were enthusiastic about the creation of their mobile app. Keywords— App Inventor; Broadening Participation; African American Student; computational thinking I. INTRODUCTION Tools like MIT App Inventor, Scratch, and Alice aim to make programming enjoyable and accessible to novices [1,2]. The difference, and perhaps an important reason for the attention MIT App Inventor has garnered, is that it allows people to create apps for smartphones. Given the popularity and ubiquity of mobile phones among this current generation of middle and high school students, MIT App Inventor seems to hold great potential for attracting a new and older generation of students to computing and computational thinking. With the rising interest in computational thinking and the lack of computer science classes available for rural African- American and Latino(a) students in middle and high school, we saw MIT App Inventor as an opportunity to embed computational thinking and mobile app development into a history course. One might ask, “why history?” Our answer is “why not history?” Traditionally K-12 history courses have earned a bad reputation for not engaging students because of their focus on memorization of facts. This is particularly true for African American and Latino populations [3,4,5]. However, new approaches of teaching K-12 history focus on more actively engaging student in the learning process through analysis of historical artifacts and construction of historical narratives. 978-1-5090-0151-4/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE This learning process is called historical thinking and it has features that align quite nicely with aspects of computational thinking as defined by CSTA’s operational definition of computational thinking. This situation makes history a prime candidate to introduce students to computer science. Our first attempt at exploring the integration of computational thinking into a history course was through the design and implementation of the Workshop for African- Americans Thinking Computational and Historically (WATCH) Program [8]. We envisioned an opportunity for students to learn Computer Science (CS) i n the context of a history course for which they were already enrolled and to leverage students’ interest in mobile apps though mobile application development to help them learn History and Computer Science. II. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK A. Alignment of Computer Science and History In designing the WATCH program, we used a constructivist-learning framework to support both computational thinking and historical thinking. At the core of Constructivist learning is the theory that people learn through actively constructing meaning from their experiences and interactions in the world [6]. Historical thinking builds on this notion of active construction of meaning through interpretation of historical documents and artifacts to construct historical narratives. A core tenant of historical thinking is the notion that there is no one “right” historical narrative but that historical documents and artifacts can be used to tell a multiplicity of narratives. Creation of such narratives requires students to be comfortable with ambiguity when working with open-ended problems; to engage in breaking down the origins, intended purposes, and audiences of historical artifacts and documents; and to find themes in the documents and artifacts and weave them back together again into a coherent narrative structure. The focus of historical thinking on students’ comfort with ambiguity, working with open-ended problems, and the process of breaking down artifacts into smaller parts, and abstracting out themes, sparked our research team’s interest in aligning history with computer science. In particular, we saw an alignment between historical thinking’s emphasis on breaking down documents and artifacts and finding themes to construct a historical narrative and the emphasis of similar dispositional practices in CSTA’s operational definition of Computational thinking for K-12 Education [7].