Justice-Centered Educational Programming Language Design

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 fluency, 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, we propose seven justice-centered design requirements for EPL, arguing that they should be accessible , liberatory , transparent , cultural , obtainable , democratic , and enduring . For each, we 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 and grand challenges for research to be able to overcome them.