Uncovering Meaningful Computing Contexts for Incarcerated College Students
Emma Hogan, John Driscoll, Adalbert Gerald Soosai Raj, William G. Griswold, Leo Porter · 2024
Higher education is expanding in United States prisons, with a growing demand for STEM offerings. Academics from other disciplines have stressed the importance of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) in prison higher education, and computing in context has shown major benefits in CS1--- especially for women and nontraditional students. More work is needed to determine what contexts are relevant to incarcerated college students, and how to incorporate these into computing curricula. In this paper, we build on prior work on computing in context and culturally relevant techniques in computing. We analyze course data from a CS1 course taught in a college-in-prison program to answer the following research question: What contexts do incarcerated students in CS1 find relevant? We identify 24 topics pursued by students across 78 open-ended programming assignment submissions, the three most popular being business management, sports statistics, and physical health. These results offer insight into potential contexts that are meaningful to incarcerated college students to be incorporated into future computing curricula and interventions in prisons.