Critical Computational Empowerment: Engaging
Youth as Shapers of the Digital Future
Mike Tissenbaum Josh Sheldon Lissa Seop
Massachusetts Institute Massachusetts Institute Youth Radio
of Technology of Technology Oakland, CA
Cambridge, MA Cambridge, MA lissa@youthradio.org
mtissen@mit.edu jsheldon@mit.edu
Abstract—While there is growing recognition of the need to
support young learners as they develop computational thinking
(CT) skills, this paper advocates for an increased focus on
computational identity (CI) and digital empowerment (DE) in
particular, as we posit that these CT skills will help young
learners become self-motivated, innovative creators. When
nurturing identity and empowerment, it is a persistent challenge
to provide youth with real-world experiences and suitable
development tools. This paper advances two key approaches to
address these issues: 1) A critical computational literacy
approach to engage youth in developing personally meaningful
applications that have impact in the real world; 2) the use of a
tool, like MIT App Inventor, that lowers barriers to creating
useful, impactful technology. Using two case-based studies, we
show how these two approaches have supported youth in
developing applications that respond to meaningful challenges in
their communities and helped them to establish their
computational identities and digital empowerment.
Keywords—computational thinking; digital empowerment;
computational identity
I. MOVING FROM DIGITAL LITERACY TO DIGITAL
EMPOWERMENT
While there has been general agreement that we need to
rethink the social and technical skills today's youth will require
to become productive members of a society that is increasingly
mediated by digital technologies [9][4], there has been little
consensus on what these skills are or how to support their
development. Many educational researchers have advocated for
teaching "digital literacies." In this case, by literacy we mean
the ability to read and write in the shared language of a culture.
Thereby, we define digital literacy as the ability to share ideas
through digital mediums. For example, digitally literate people
might, upload posts and videos to social networking sites, or
contribute to shared knowledge through the use of
collaborative tools such as wikis [6][13][11].
A challenge with much of the work around supporting
students’ digital literacy is that it is often detached from the
context of engagement and empowerment for the participants.
I.e., blogs and wikis may allow participants to discuss an event,
but lack immediacy. They are often viewed or read on a screen
far removed, in one or more dimensions, from the topic itself.
Further participation is often fragmented and bound by the
limitations of using off-the-shelf technologies (e.g., Facebook,
YouTube).
Clifford H. Lee Natalie Lao
St. Mary’s College of Massachusetts Institute
California of Technology
Moraga, CA Cambridge, MA
chl3@stmarys-ca.edu manting@mit.edu
Another challenge with this view of "digital literacy" is
that it largely separates the computational aspects from the
social aspects. That is, students develop a critical
understanding of the unique affordances and capabilities of
computation divorced from any active participation in their
own learning. Supporting learners in developing deeper
understandings of how to think "computationally" offers them
opportunities to not only create digital products, but more
critically, to formulate problems and their solutions so that the
solutions can be solved computationally [1][2][5]. Brennan and
Resncik describe three core aspects of computational thinking:
concepts, the key constructs and ideas that are central to most
forms of computing; practices, the activities people engage in
when creating computational projects; and perspectives, the
ways in which individuals see themselves as computational
thinkers [5].
For us, the development of computational thinking
perspectives is particularly critical in supporting individual
growth. Our recent work centers on two key elements within
CT perspectives: digital empowerment (DE), which describes
the recognition of their capacity to can have active, positive
roles creating tools and artifacts with computers to enhance
their lives and the lives of people around them.; and
computational identity, the formation of their identities as
people who can think computationally and their membership in
the computational community more broadly. This definition of
computational identity draws from the corresponding concept
in science education, namely scientific identity (i.e., learners
see themselves as scientists and feel that they are engaging in
the authentic practices of scientists [15]).
In 2006, Scardamalia and Bereiter argued the need to
develop technologies that allowed students to engage in the
authentic practices of a knowledge community, rather than
subvert the practices to fit existing off-the-shelf tools.
Similarly, if our aim is to support youth in developing their
digital empowerment, we need to provide them with
programming environments that offer the creative freedom to
design and develop computational approaches for interacting
with the world around them. Expressing this kind of creative
freedom has traditionally required individuals to learn a text-
based programming language (e.g., Java, or Javascript). These
languages create significant barriers for novices and non-
programmers to thinking computationally and building digital
products. In the past, to start building computational artifacts,
novice learners would have to learn opaque, sometimes arcane,
programming languages in tandem with developing critical
thinking skills, i.e. computational thinking. Now, while there is
little agreement on the precise definition of "computational
thinking" [1], there is general consensus that it is distinct from
pure "coding." As a result, many are advocating for platforms
that reduce the barriers for learners to design, build, and
implement their computational ideas. Such platforms would
reduce the cognitive load of coding, allowing learners to invest
more effort in becoming computational thinkers.
Fig. 1. The App Inventor designer view, where users design their app’s user interface
Fig. 2. The App Inventor blocks editor, where users build the logic for their app
We believe that true empowerment comes from creating
interventions that move into the physical world - interventions
that allow learners to analyze problems in their communities
and devise real solutions to these problems. As such, we have
been working with a platform called MIT App Inventor that
allows learners to quickly design, build, and share mobile
applications. MIT App Inventor is a blocks-based
programming language that allows users to quickly build,
refine, and share fully functional mobile applications without
the need to understand or wrestle with complicated syntax (See
Fig. 1 and Fig. 2).
II. USING CRITICAL COMPUTATIONAL LITERACY TO DRIVE
DIGITAL EMPOWERMENT
To support youth as they develop their computational
identities and become more digitally empowered, there is a
need to make meaningful connections between their designs
and the world around them - their designs should allow them to
have real impact on issues that affect their daily lives. In
response, a team from Youth Radio, a non-profit media
organization that supports journalism by young people, has
been using MIT App Inventor to develop a new pedagogical
and conceptual framework they call critical computational
literacy [8]. Critical computational literacy (CCL) combines
computational thinking and critical pedagogy. The view of
computational thinking that informs CCL accounts for complex
analytical and interpretive practices that go well beyond the
mechanics of learning to code [2][5]. Indebted to Paolo Freire
[3], as well as more contemporary work in literacy studies, the
notion of critical pedagogy that frames CCL centers
marginalized points of view and creates conditions for young
people to break silences, reveal obscured truths, and challenge
unjust systems and conditions. Young makers carry out this
important work through collaborative digital authorship.
Together with peers and colleagues, they envision, design, and
develop a range of digital projects and release their work to real
audiences. These products include downloadable apps, web-
based interactives, and transmedia stories through which young
people acquire technical skills, participate in civic life, and
engage their communities as co-creators.
Taken together, digital empowerment and computational
identity are enhanced by the development of critical
computational literacy. By grounding learning and activity in a
relevant, real-world frame, youth who are becoming critically,
computationally literate can also develop their computational
identities towards becoming digitally empowered.
III. EXAMPLES OF CRITICAL COMPUTATIONAL
EMPOWERMENT
A. Example 1: Engaging Youth Around Mental Health
Critical computational literacy at Youth Radio can emerge
at every stage in the creation of a digital product, from ideation
to research, design, development, testing, publication, and
community engagement sparked by the finished work. In
framing one mobile app created using MIT App Inventor,
Mood Ring, a group of teens knew they wanted to build a tool
that promoted youth health. They pinpointed mental health as a
particular interest. After rounds and rounds of brainstorming,
user research, and wireframing, they landed on the specific
goal of their app: to enable users totrack how they’re feeling
using any combination of nine emojis so that they could better
understand their own mental health and receive appropriate
emotional support from trusted friends (Fig. 3).
While the app would have been a lot easier to build if users
could only pick one emoji, the designers knew that a marker of
their complex young-adult lives was the simultaneous
experience of multiple, sometimes conflicting emotions. The
development of Mood Ring needed to be careful not to
pathologize sadness or narrow young people’s understandings
of their own emotional states. So, the coding task became
harder—they needed to build functionality that allowed users
to select several emojis at one time. These youths overcame
that technical challenge in order to create a project that
accomplished the ambitious social goals they sought.
This is an example of how young people came to see
themselves as competent developers capable of taking on
daunting computational tasks, cultivating empowerment not
only in themselves but also among their target users.
B. Example 2: Providing Relief to Disaster Stricken Areas
Developing solutions for an underrepresented or
marginalized group can also spring from responses to
unexpected real-time events. Ananya, a 10-year old from India,
was inspired by discussions in her classroom and decided that
she wanted to find a solution to help flood victims in the Tamil
Nadu region of India, and in the city of Chennai in particular.
Many residents of Chennai had lost their homes and
belongings, and relief efforts were struggling to coordinate
resources and to reach those who needed help the most. Many
of those affected were poor and lacked the means to seek help
on their own. In response, Ananya developed CalamityRelief,
an app that helped coordinate the dropping off and picking up
of relief supplies (Fig. 4). Users of her app can see a list of
collection centers to find the nearest one, as well as guidelines
for what they should or should not donate [14]. The app also
helps coordinate distributors and social workers, informing
them of what materials are at which donation centers, so they
know where and when to pick up relief supplies. While
developing CalamityRelief, Ananya needed to carefully
consider what the needs of the community were and how her
contribution could reduce many of the challenges facing the
donation process (i.e., what is really needed, where, and when).
Using a critical computational literacy approach, we see
that Ananya was able to provide a voice to a group that was
both marginalized traditionally and as a result of the
extraordinary circumstances of the floods. The development of
the CalamityRelief app enabled Ananya to develop her
computational identity by recognizing a problem in the world
that had personal connections (she has relatives living in the
Chennai area) that could be solved computationally. Her ability
to actually develop and deploy the app using MIT App
Inventor instilled in her a sense of digital empowerment. As a
result, Ananya now feels empowered to design computational
solutions to new challenges in her everyday life. Ananya stated
that next she wants "to develop more social apps – like for
recycling garbage. Many people don’t know where recycling
units are located, so they simply throw all their garbage
wherever they want and it goes into landfills. [She] wants to
develop an app to help people find where these recycling units
are located." [14]. She has also recently developed an app that
uses remote sensors to measure leaks in plumbing fixtures. At a
very young age, she has come to see herself as someone who
can impact her world through computing.
Fig. 4. A screen from the CalamityRelief app
IV. DISCUSSION AND CONLCUSION
While there is a wealth of research showing that
engagement in authentic, real-world practices is vital to the
development of students' identities as scientists and engineers
[7], providing opportunities for youth to engage in similar
practices around computational thinking is a younger, and
perhaps more challenging, endeavor. Most introductory coding
courses and tutorials (e.g. codeacademy.org) aim to teach
students a particular programming language, focusing on
teaching students "how to code," rather than encouraging them
to learn to think computationally. If computational thinking is
going to have the transformational effect across all disciplines
predicted by Wing [16], and if today's youth are going to drive
this change, we need to radically rethink the contexts we
provide students to think computationally with, both socially
and programmatically.
This paper advances the use of critical computational
literacy as a lens for youth to situate their computational
thinking in contexts that are relevant to them and to their lives,
and as a means for developing their computational identities
and digital empowerment. We also advocate for programming
environments that reduce the barriers for youth to design,
develop, implement, and iterate on their designs. In particular,
we show two examples from many in which the MIT App
Inventor platform allowed novices to create complicated
applications that would likely have been prohibitive in
traditional programming languages such as Java or Swift.
In the cases presented above, youth were able to recognize
and give a voice to communities that they perceived as being
underrepresented: in Mood Ring, the youth recognized the
need to address mental health issues affecting their friends and
peers; and in CalamityRelief, Ananya responded to the
unfortunate conditions that beset the inhabitants of Chennai,
many of whom lacked the ability to seek help before the
disaster struck. As a result, in both scenarios, these creators
awakened their personal identities as empowered
computational thinkers. We strongly believe that developing
digital empowerment and computational identity will serve
youth better than learning the syntax of a particular
programming language in today’s increasingly digitally
mediated society.
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