Mr. Bousquet receives the 2022 National NCWIT AiC Educator Award (Vimeo)

Nicholas Bousquet teaches computer science at Plainfield High School in Connecticut, where he also runs the coding club, is building a computer science lab, serves as a building-level tech mentor, and consults for the district’s K-8 CSforALL SCRIPT implementation. Despite joining the school only recently, Bousquet’s passion for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion is already having an impact: enrollment by students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or People of Color in his courses exceeds proportional representation, and enrollment of women and non-binary students in computer science is growing.

Bousquet’s leadership roles outside of the classroom focus on the development of equity-minded computer science instructional resources for several national professional learning communities for teachers. He credits a 2015 Ted Talk by Ashley Gavin, who defined computer science as “a medium for problem solving and self-expression,” for the core pedagogy that drives the development of his CSforALL instructional resources. He begins by observing where underrepresented students can be found within a school, such as a biomed class that is passionate about public health or a choral group that loves performance, and then develops accessible, hands-on labs such as a DNA Analyzer Programming Lab with Kanban, or a Coding Pop Music Lab in Java. “Authentic, interest-driven and inquiry-based activities such as these have been well received in both my classroom and my colleagues’ classrooms across the country, and particularly invaluable in our collective efforts to broaden participation in computing,” he shares. Bousquet is also excited about the interdisciplinary potential that integrated data science activities can offer. He has been working with Brown University’s Bootstrap Curriculum Development Team, and his classroom-ready blended learning labs have found their way into schools from coast to coast. He is also the founder of HourOfData.org, which he hopes will help attract both teachers and students to the field of data science. Read more...

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