To paraphrase Ruthe Farmer, the White House’s Tech Inclusion Advisor: We must include everyone, not just for the social and economic justice issues, but for the necessary diversity of thought to drive innovation. We must recognize the components of equity:  

• Diversity: counting who is in the room.
• Access: Who knows the room exists? Who has the map to the room? Who has transportation and a key?
• Inclusion: Who feels welcome in the room?

– See more on the CS Education in Oregon Symposium recap post.

Culturally Situated Design tools use traditional indigenous art forms and knowledge to teach design, math, and coding. Ron Eglash from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute seems to be the authority in this field. Several activities from African, African-American, Native American, Latino, and Youth Culture are available.

• Academic discussion (“ethnomathematics”) is here and
• Native American Cybernetics: Indigenous Knowledge Resources in Information Technology. Many of the links overlap with the Culturally Situated Design Tools, but some additional discussion and links are given. There are some broken links to the Native Seeds program now found here.
• Eglash, Ron. “Computation, Complexity and Coding in Native American Knowledge Systems.” in Judith Hankes and Gerald Fast (ed) Changing the Faces of Mathematics: Perspectives on Indigenous People of North America. Reston, VA: NCTM 2002.
• Computational Thinking with Adinkra uses traditional Ghanaian symbols as a programming challenge for high schoolers coding in CSnap, a drag and drop block language.

Culturally Based Curriculum Resources from the Alaska Native Knowledge Network are here, and include weather/climate and ecological resources. I am not at the moment finding additional resources in these categories that I have previously seen for Northwest Native American tribes. I will keep looking.

Some gender equity resources:

• Technolochicas — Spanish or English
• National Center for Women in Information Technology Resources
• EngineerGirl — middle school, younger high school
• Engineer Your Life — high school women

Resources Redux:

• Free Educational Resources from Federal Agencies
• Finding Free STEM Curricula, Activities and Resources
• Finding Industry Endorsed Content for K-12 and Beyond

Respectfully submitted,
Jo Oshiro,
jo@oregoncsta.org