The REMEZCLA program, a collaborative research project between researchers at Georgia Tech and the University of Puerto Rico – Río Piedras, is completing its third year of extended middle and high school programming. The National Science Foundation-funded project expands Latinx student representation in computer science (CS) through a culturally relevant curriculum, based around EarSketch, a Tech-developed, web-based digital audio workstation. Since its inception, over 300 participants have attended simultaneous afterschool programs and summer camps at both partner universities.

Over the summer, researchers from both partner institutions presented at the Research in Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT) Conference in Atlanta. In discussing equity pedagogies in CS education, they cited key factors from the REMEZCLA project that can broaden access and engagement of Latinx youth in CS. These factors included the structural conditions that combine coding, music production, and identity exploration, thereby enabling authentic engagement; the enhanced language access now embedded in EarSketch which includes traditional and contemporary Latin beats and sounds created by musical artists in Georgia and Puerto Rico; the informal learning curriculum centered on the students’ cultures and heritage; and the effective practices to elicit cultural congruity (a sense of cultural connection) in students within CS contexts.

The first two years of the initiative were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic with workshops held either entirely or partially online. The 2022-2023 afterschool sessions were the first time both teams were able to host fully in-person workshops at local middle and high schools. The Atlanta team is led by Associate Vice President for Institute Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Diley Hernández, who serves as the principal investigator. Faculty and staff from the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing and the School of Music, including co-principal investigators Jayma Koval and Jason Freeman, round out the team. This year, the team partnered with Berkmar Middle School and Lakeside High School for twenty weeks of instruction over the course of fall and spring.

Christopher Martinez Servin, a Georgia Tech graduate student in computer science, joined as an instructor at the start of the program and was able to apply his academic and professional experience to the role.

“This experience helped me communicate better with students who had little experience with computer science and helped me improve my instruction abilities to make challenging concepts fun and easy to understand while never forgetting the power of the topics we covered,” said Servin, who is currently a systems engineer at Blue Origin, an American aerospace manufacturer.

During the spring semester, Tech biomedical engineering major Indy Cabeda Diaz, who continued her work with CEISMC after having served as a pre-teaching intern at Centennial Academy in Atlanta, was added to the instructional group. “REMEZCLA is an excellent opportunity for children whose native language is Spanish to learn computer science,” said the recent graduate. “The program not only brings together students of similar backgrounds but also includes instructors who speak their language and understand their culture, creating an environment that feels like home.”

In addition to the in-person instruction, the program included an all-day field trip to campus where students had the opportunity to have an interactive discussion with members of the EarSketch team, who listened to some of the students’ remixes and discussed how to fix coding errors or add codes. “We are extremely proud to host the REMEZCLA students at Georgia Tech and create opportunities for them to explore our campus,” said Hernández. “When they visited the School of Music and talked to other Tech students there, it was beautiful to watch them realize that they can understand perfectly well what Tech students are working on, and how it is connected to what they did in EarSketch through their participation in REMEZCLA. These are very talented, creative and brilliant students, but experiences like these can also be incredibly affirming and motivating and expand their vision of what is possible in their future.”

--Michael Turner, CEISMC Communications