CodeBears is a summer computing camp at Morgan State University. I coordinated it across three summers, which means the version of it I know best is the operational one: recruiting, scheduling, matching mentors to groups, and the daily work of keeping a room of middle and high school students engaged with material that many of them arrived believing was not for them.
The research question underneath the logistics was about stereotypes. Not whether students could learn to program, which was never in doubt, but what they believed about who programs. Two papers came out of it: one at SIGCSE 2024 on breaking stereotypes and feeding the STEM pipeline, and one at BICE 2024 on the specific insights the camp produced about empowering underrepresented youth.
What the camp taught me about teaching
Most of what I now believe about teaching came from this room rather than from a course. The students who disengaged were rarely the ones who found the material hard; they were the ones who had decided, early and quietly, that being confused was evidence they did not belong. Everything I do in a classroom now is downstream of trying to break that inference.
The associated poster and presentation took 3rd place at the ACM Undergraduate Research Competition at the Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing in 2024.