Watch this film featuring the voices of students in Los Angeles Unified School District Computer Science classes.

When the 2020 SIGCSE Conference was canceled due to the COVID-19 crisis, we decided to create a video in place of the student panel that was scheduled for Saturday, March 14, 2020. We wanted to make sure that the CS for All community would still have an opportunity to hear about the amazing projects and perspectives of high school computer science students coming from communities historically underrepresented in computing! In this video, we give a brief overview about our research project (http://csequityproject.org/real-cs), followed by approximately 20 minutes of students sharing about the projects they made in AP Computer Science Principles and Exploring Computer Science classes. This is followed by students’ responses to the questions below: 

1) Should computer science be mandatory in high school?

2) If you could do anything with computer science, what would you do?

3) If you could design your own high school computer science class, what would it be like?

4) What relationship do you see between identity and computer science, if any?

5) What advice would you like to give computer science teachers?

6) What has your teacher done that has helped you learn computer science?

This project is funded by the National Science Foundation and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Any opinions, findings, or recommendations expressed in this film are those of the students/authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders.

Following Computer Science Education Week 2019, the Los Angeles Unified School District Instructional Technology Initiative produced this video to serve as a call to action to expand computer science learning opportunities for all students. This video features the important work and voices of our LAUSD ITI partners, as well as REAL-CS UCLA team members explaining why equity needs to sit at the heart of computer science education implementation today.