Computing Education for Intercultural Learning: Lessons from the Nairobi Play Project

This paper explores computing education as a potential site for intercultural learning and encounter in post-conflict environments. It reports on ethnographic fieldwork from the Nairobi Play Project, a constructionist educational program serving adolescents aged 14-18 in urban and rural multi-ethnic refugee communities in Kenya. While the program offers programming and game design instruction, an equal goal is to foster interaction, collaboration, dialogue and understanding across cultural backgrounds. Based on fieldwork from two project cycles involving 5 after-school classes of 12-24 students each, we describe key affordances for encounter, important resistances to be managed or overcome, and emergent complications in the execution of such programs. We argue that many important accomplishments of intercultural learning occur through moments of friction, breakdowns, and gaps -- for example, technical challenges that produce sites of shared humour; frictions between intercultural activities and computing activities; acts of disrupting order; and unstructured time that students collaboratively fill in. We also describe significant complications in such programs, including pressures to adopt norms and practices consistent with dominant or majority cultures, and instances of intercultural bonding over artefacts with xenophobic themes. We reflect on the implications of these phenomena for the design of future programs that use computing as a backbone for intercultural learning or diversity and inclusion efforts in CSCW, ICTD, and allied fields of work.