Computational communities: African-American cultural capital in computer science education.

Enrolling the cultural capital of underrepresented communities in PK-12 technology and curriculum design has been a primary strategy for broadening the participation of students of color in U.S. computer science (CS) fields. This article examines two ways that African-American cultural capital and computing can be bridged in CS education. The first is <italic>community representation,</italic> using cultural capital to highlight students’ social identities and networks through computational thinking. The second, <italic>computational integration,</italic> locates computation in cultural capital itself. I survey two risks - the appearance of shallow computing and the reproduction of assimilationist logics - that may arise when constructing one bridge without the other. To avoid these risks, I introduce the concept of <italic>computational communities</italic> by exploring areas in CS education that employ both strategies. This concept is then grounded in qualitative data from an after school program that connected CS to African-American cosmetology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]