This week, the UChicago Consortium on School Research (CCSR) released a new evaluation report on the early days of CAFÉCS (Barrow, Freire, & de la Torre, 2020). The report provides tremendous validation to our partners at the Chicago Public Schools Office of Computer Science, DePaul University, Loyola University, and UIC. More than a decade ago, Don Yanek, CPS computer science teacher, Brenda Wilkerson, manager of the CPS Career and Technical Education IT track, Lucia Dettori, associate dean at DePaul University, Dale Reed, computer science faculty at UIC, and Ron Greenberg, computer science faculty at Loyola University sat around a conference table at Northside College prep and lamented the state of affairs in computer science education in high school and in college. Despite the rising prominence of tech companies in the economy, fewer and fewer students in general were going into computer science and the gender, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities were appalling. They pledged then and there that despite having no funding, they would band together to do something about it in Chicago. Thus, the CS4All movement in Chicago was born. Many years later, “CS4All” became part of the national lexicon after President Obama adopted the term for his signature legislation in support of a national computer science movement.
These early pioneers soon discovered a like-minded group of computer science educators in Gail Chapman and Joanna Goode who were working in Los Angeles to develop the Exploring Computer Science (ECS) curriculum. The ECS curriculum was designed to make computer science meaningful to all high school students regardless of their prior computer science experience. Building equity and inquiry strategies into the program was the foundation for the development of computer science concepts...