Teaching Algorithms to Indigenous Students of Brazil's Amazon

The Constitution of Brazil and its subsequent laws have established various rights and protections for Indigenous peoples, among them the right to Indigenous schools where their culture and native language must be taught, learned, and preserved as something alive and essential to their well-being. Brazil's National Digital Education Policy, which mandates the teaching of computing in K-12 education, is a recent development not yet implemented in indigenous schools, where access to computers and the Internet is still quite limited. To promote the inclusion of indigenous populations in higher education, the University of Brasília (UnB), in collaboration with Brazil's National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples, has created an admission pathway dedicated to students from these populations. In 2022, UNB's Computer Science Department welcomed its first three Indigenous students from the Ticuna community in the Amazon region of Brazil. The Ticuna people represent the largest indigenous ethnic group in Brazil. Ticuna students, computer science professors, and computer science students at UnB have collaborated to address the gap in the K-12 teaching of computing in Ticuna communities. This work describes the materials created by the indigenous students for teaching computing in their communities within the context of their culture and language.