WIP: Challenging and Transforming Computing Education for Future K-12 Teachers

This innovative practice WIP paper describes an effort to introduce future teachers, who are primarily Hispanic and planning to be PK-8 teachers, to computational thinking for teacher preparation at a Hispanic Serving Institution located on the U.S.-Mexico border. An interdisciplinary team of education and computer science faculty is implementing efforts to increase pre-college student engagement in computational thinking (CT) along with increased equity, particularly for Hispanic and women. One aspect of these efforts is the modification of an existing CT course that will eventually be required for all teacher preparation students. The first pilot of this CT course was conducted in the fall 2023 and included quality pedagogical approaches to teach CT content to primarily Hispanic pre-service elementary teachers.