Being a Good Student: Risks and Reactive Coping Strategies Encountered in a Summer STEM Makerspace for Black Youth

There has been a large push over the last decade to drive STEM interest during the formative years of adolescence through computer science related initiatives such as computational makerspaces that allow students to design and build personally connected artifacts. However, these programs are not often designed to be culturally relevant to the students they aim to motivate. This paper presents a case study of one student who participated in the first iteration of a summer makerspace camp for Black youth ages 12-16. The design principles guiding this STEM camp adapted pedagogies for computational making for belonging and becoming (Escude et al., 2020) with a goal of fostering culturally relevant STEM identity development. Using the phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST; Wigfield et al., 2007) as a theoretical and analytical lens, we present three phenomenological episodes representing an overview of the student’s arc from Days 1-8 of the 12- day camp. Over time we see the student extend the boundaries and objects of their coping strategies, moving from just utilizing the resources in front of him to thinking more flexibly about where help can be found. We argue that this student is an ideal case for refining design principles and providing insights into supporting belonging and becoming in the context of computational making.