UC San Diego

Little is known in computing education research about teaching CS in adult prison contexts, or how to help adult incarcerated college students succeed in computing. Thus, my doctoral work has sought to establish a foundational understanding of best practices for computing higher education to broaden participation in computing amongst incarcerated and formerly incarcerated adults. This work draws on existing theories and frameworks from CS education and other fields, including design experiment methodology, critical andragogy, culturally relevant education, and computing in context. Findings are based on teaching 72 incarcerated college students across three iterations of introductory CS in a local college-in-prison program. This includes results of 1) using a design experiment methodology in offering CS1 in an adult prison, documenting various barriers and adapted strategies for mitigating them; 2) a qualitative analysis of 78 open-ended programming assignment submissions identifying 24 potential meaningful computing contexts for incarcerated adult students; 3) a phenomenographic study of fears of incarcerated adult students entering a CS1 course, changes in confidence throughout the course, and how fears and confidence compare between CS1 students in prison vs. on main campus; 4) a mixed methods study of students’ attitudes toward computing before and after a CS1 course, measuring the impacts of students gaining access to a code interpreter in the final iteration of the course. This is followed by a discussion of next steps in this work, including how these results can inform policy changes to help make computer science degrees in prison a reality.