Justice-Centered Educational Programming Languages
Amy Ko gives her talk “Justice-Centered Educational Programming Languages” on April 16, 2025.
EECS Colloquium
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
306 Soda Hall
4:00 – 5:00 pm
Amy Ko
Professor of CS at the University of Washington and Co-Director of the UW Center for Learning, Computing, and Imagination
Abstract
Educational programming languages (EPL), for all their success in enabling computing education at scale, regularly exclude learners by embedding assumptions about ability, class, culture, language, and identity. Further, most EPL designs are not governed in ways that are responsive to the needs of learners and their communities on the margins of computing, raising questions about how the design processes behind EPL could be organized to ensure they serve everyone equitably. Building upon discourse on diversity, educational justice, and design justice, I propose seven justice-centered design requirements for EPL, arguing that they should be accessible, liberatory, transparent, cultural, obtainable, democratic, and enduring. I examine why these requirements are necessary and offer examples of languages that do and do not meet them. Throughout, we surface constraints that EPL impose on being justice-centered, grand challenges for research to be able to overcome them, and give glimpses of how we might achieve them.
Biography
Amy J. Ko is a Professor at the University of Washington Information School and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering (courtesy). She co-directs the UW Center for Learning, Computing, and Imagination, where she studies computing education, human-computer interaction, and humanity’s individual and collective struggle to understand computing and harness it for creativity, equity, and justice. With her collaborators, she’s invented many programming languages and tools to support debugging, program understanding, reuse, and learning; founded and sold a venture-backed startup focused on software troubleshooting; developed numerous ways to weave equity and justice into computing education pedagogy, culture, and technology; and impacted local, state, and federal K-12 CS education policy through community organizing and advocacy. Her work has received 22 receiving distinguished paper awards and 6 receiving most influential paper awards. She is an ACM Distinguished Member and a member of the SIGCHI Academy, for her substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction, computing education, and software engineering. She received her Ph.D. at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008, and degrees in Computer Science and Psychology with Honors from Oregon State University in 2002.