Characterizing High School Participants’ Motivations and Outcomes in a Service-Oriented Summer Internship

In order to meet the increasing demand for a CS and STEM workforce, expanded CS educational opportunities are being introduced as early as K-12. While many programs exist inside a traditional school structure (e.g, standalone CS courses) out-of-school programs such as internships are also becoming a popular way for students to learn to program. Service-focused computing internships provide an opportunity for students to learn computer science while also giving back to their community in some way. While it is known that many marginalized groups in STEM (e.g., women, Black students, etc) are motivated by careers that are service oriented, little else is know about student motivations for participating in K-12 service-oriented internships. In this study, we interview 20 high school student interns to better understand why students elected to participate in an internship and the effect of participation in a service-oriented virtual summer internship on participants’ identities, attitudes, and confidence in computing. In summer 2020, these high school students participated in a 6-week, university-based, computer science internship program, which leveraged high school interns’ programming skills and classroom experience to assist teachers in developing computing-infused lessons for their classrooms. In this article, we identify reasons interns participated in the program, what they expected to get out of the internship, and what they perceived to be the impacts of participating in the internship.