Increasing diversity in the CS pipeline is a longstanding concern (Margolis, Estrella, Goode, Holme, & Nao, 2010) and part of doing this is creating equitable pathways to CS. The CS for All movement has generated excitement around the country and fostered new strands of research about computer science education and computational thinking. Yet there are still many open questions about computational thinking and coding interest with elementary school aged children. Since learning is distributed across time and space, it often looks different outside of school than what gets evaluated in school (Barron & Bell, 2015; Barron, 2014). Understanding what early computational thinking looks like and where and how students are learning these thinking skills is critical to beginning to develop and test lessons and assessments. This poster presents case studies of coding interest that explore the resources that children in a low-income school in Silicon Valley have to engage in digital practice and learn the fundamentals of coding. The analysis uses a learning ecology framework (Barron, 2006) to contextualize the students’ learning resources and interests, and map connections between them across time and space. While school appears as an important node for computational thinking resources, students’ interest in coding builds across time and space, and indeed becomes most evident when we look at their time outside of school where students use their time to learn and explore through networked resources including YouTube and online gaming communities.
