Culturally Situated Design Tools: Where Culture and Computing Meet
Professors Audrey G. Bennett and Ron Eglash (University of Michigan), Michael Lachney (Assistant Professor, Michigan State University), and Matt Drazin (Doctoral student, Michigan State University) delivered a joint presentation at Michigan State University’s College of Education Technology Conference in East Lansing, Michigan on November 3.
Titled “Culturally Situated Design Tools: Where Culture and Computing Meet,” the presentation introduced teachers across the state of Michigan to their C‑STEM collaborative research project on diversifying STEM education with heritage algorithms, funded by the National Science Foundation and Google. As part of the presentation, teachers were given an opportunity to engage with Culturally Situated Design Tools, a suite of tools that aim to engage teachers (and their students respectively) in the computational thinking that is already a part of their students’ cultures and encourage teachers to work with members of their students’ local communities.