Vviewpoints
to address issues of engagement and
education. While specifically charged
with addressing the long-standing
underrepresentation of many groups
within the computing community,
many, if not most, of the Alliances’
activities also worked to increase
awareness, access, engagement,
and inclusion for all students. The
Alliances’ strategies encompass not
only activity design and implementation but also promotion of computing
education through workshops and
information dissemination.
Considered together as a whole, the
BPC Alliances are expected to have significant impact on both the quality of
opportunities afforded to participants
and the number of participants. To assess this collective impact, in 2012, EDC,
Inc., was awarded a contract to evaluate
the accomplishments and impacts of
the BPC-A program as a whole. They partnered with Westat, Inc., and the College
of Education at Kansas State University
in the multiple-year evaluation to investigate the BPC-A program’s creation of a
national system of resources to support
broadening participation in computing,
focusing document review on the first
five years (2006–2011) and empirical
data collection on the second five years
of program funding (2011–2016).
As of 2011, there were eight BPC
Alliances:
˲ Access Computing (AC), University
of Washington; http://www.washing-
ton.edu/accesscomputing/
˲ Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI), University of Texas at El Paso; http://cahsi.
cs.utep.edu/
˲ Sustainable Diversity in the Computing Research Pipeline: Computing
Research Association-Women/ The Coalition to Diversity Computing (
CRA-W/CDC), the Computing Research Association in Washington D.C.; http://
cra.org/cra-w/
˲ Expanding Computing Education
Pathways (ECEP), University of Massa-
IN EARLY 2016, the White House announced a government-wide investment in computing edu- cation—Computer Science for All—to be included in the
President’s 2017 budget. Computer
Science for All would give every P– 12
student the chance to learn computer
science and to be given the opportunities “that allow them to join the innovation economy, have the tools to solve
our toughest challenges, and become
active citizens in our increasingly technological world.”
2 A major component
of the initiative is inclusion in computing by students from underrepresented groups, such as African Americans,
Hispanics, Native Americans, and people with disabilities. The White House
announcement stated that CS for All
builds on computing education momentum at state and local levels.
Although the sources of this mo-
mentum were not named, we speculate
that an important impetus for innova-
tion and growth in computer science
P– 12 education comes from programs
funded at the federal level, such as the
NSF-funded CS 10K initiative, and com-
munity efforts, such as code.org. Pre-
dating these P– 12 education efforts, the
National Science Foundation launched
the Broadening Participation in Com-
puting (BPC) program in 2006 as a mod-
el to effectively address the issues of un-
derrepresentation, as well as respond
to the need to increase participation
in computing education and produce
computing professionals. Chubin and
Johnson1 provided a description of the
11 alliances that constituted the core
of BPC as of 2009. In total, 15 BPC Alli-
ances (BPC-A) have been funded. These
Alliances represent broad coalitions of
academic postsecondary institutions,
secondary and middle schools, govern-
ment, industry, professional societies,
and other not-for-profit organizations.
The goal of BPC-Alliances is to design and carry out comprehensive programs to reduce underrepresentation
in the computing disciplines at various stages of the academic pathway
from K– 12 through the early faculty
ranks. To this end, the BPC-Alliances
have endeavored to create the best
practices, educational resources, advocacy networks, and forums needed
Broadening
Participation
The Influence and
Promise of Alliances
Evaluating the influence of broadening participation
efforts on students, faculty, organizations,
and the computing education infrastructure.
DOI: 10.1145/3084346
Alliances use diverse
strategies to expose
students to computing
concepts and careers.