Exploratory Reading Groups: A Scalable Approach to Creative, Relational, and Student-Driven Exploration in CS Education

Most CS education initiatives focus primarily on teaching raw computational skills and domain knowledge. While this is certainly important, it ignores the creative and real-world aspects that are needed for applying skills to societal problems, and for attracting more diverse populations of students. One way to impart this type of learning is through undergraduate research. Unfortunately, these opportunities are limited and hard to scale due to their need for mentorship. In this paper, we introduce exploratory reading groups as a way to support creativity and intrinsic motivation in a scalable manner. In contrast to graduate journal clubs, exploratory reading groups are designed for broad exploration of ideas, and their lightweight, student-driven nature makes them easily scalable. We present design patterns for structuring groups learned over a two-year time period of running and iterating on exploratory reading groups through a user-centered process. This time period saw the program grow from a group of 6 students to having served over 260 students, all participating completely voluntarily. In surveys and interviews of participants, we found that students valued the experience tremendously, but that successful exploration took on diverse meanings. We found that surprisingly strong relational ties developed from a simple intervention, and describe three clusters of participant motivations and experiences that emerged.