Motivating Literature and Evaluation of the Teaching Practices Game: Preparing Teaching Assistants to Promote Inclusivity

In the US, there are longstanding patterns of underrepresentation in computing (see Table 1). To make CS more inclusive, we can train computer science (CS) teaching assistants (TAs) to create inclusive classrooms. The Teaching Practices Game is a scenariobased card game meant to prepare CS TAs for difficult situations they may encounter and help them promote diversity and inclusion. Game participants (N=86) were surveyed from multiple institutions. The majority of survey respondents (N=86) agreed or strongly agreed that the game taught them new strategies for responding to difficult teaching situations (83%) and for discussing diversity and inclusion (69%). Additionally, respondents reported that the game made them more confident (74%) and more likely (66%) to respond to biased statements. Contrary to our hypotheses, we found that there were small and statistically insignificant differences in enjoyment, learning, or likelihood of response to biased statements between participants who do and do not identify as underrepresented in CS. A primary contribution of the research is a review of professional development practices and diversity training strategies that can inform the training of TAs, and we discuss the extent to which best practices from previous research were incorporated in the game.