Code Beats: A Virtual Camp for Middle Schoolers Coding Hip Hop

In spite of the efforts to provide computer science education for all, the percentage of Black and Latino Americans entering the computer science (CS) field has been stagnant for years. In an effort to attract and engage students many summer camps and after-school clubs use robotics, video-games, and even IoT devices, but these approaches seem to only attract those already considering STEM careers, a population low in Black and Latino students. To attract Black and Latino students to computer science a promising approach is to engage with their culture, making CS relevant to them personally. To this end, we present an approach that teaches middle school students to program using hip hop beats, intentionally leveraging a genre of music that appeals to a wide array of urban youth of color. This approach, called Code Beats, uses extensive scaffolding to support beginning students, authentic-sounding beats to engage students, and a expressive programming environment to support creative freedom. We present the results of our pilot camp, where students clearly showed an increase in computing enjoyment, confidence, belonging, and persistence. By the end of this course, all students were able to create their own, original beat from scratch, suggesting their progression to the Create phase of the Use-Modify-Create framework.