A classroom project in Birmingham, Alabama, shows how students can combine programming, historical research, and community storytelling. The approach offers a practical model for connecting computer science with civic responsibility, but its educational impact depends on more than the technology students build.

Computer science education often emphasizes programming syntax, computational logic, and software development. These technical foundations are essential, but they do not fully prepare students to consider how technology affects the people who use it or the communities in which it operates.

A classroom project described by educator Tambra Clark in EdSurge's report, "How Coding Can Cultivate Deep Civic Engagement", offers a practical example of how schools can connect programming with history, community identity, and civic participation.

Clark describes how her experience studying the history of the civil rights movement influenced her approach to teaching computer science at South Hampton K-8 School in Birmingham, Alabama. Rather than treating coding as an isolated technical exercise, she encouraged students to use their programming skills to document local historical figures and make their stories accessible through interactive applications.

The project provides a useful case study in interdisciplinary education. It also raises an important question for educators: how can schools ensure that students learn to build functioning technology while developing the research skills, ethical judgment, and historical understanding needed to use it responsibly?

From Programming Exercises to Community Storytelling

According to Clark's account, students initially worked with Apple's Swift Playground and an application template focused on personal interests. The class subsequently shifted toward a project called "Coding Birmingham's Black Legacy," in which students developed interactive applications about people who contributed to the city's history.

The applications used a four-screen structure: an introductory page about a historical figure, a biographical summary, a collection of notable facts, and a gallery containing historical materials such as photographs, documents, or video.

This structure connected several learning activities that are often taught separately. Students had to organize information, design an interface, write and structure code, and decide how to present a person's life and historical significance to an audience.

Clark also describes students using generative AI tools to help synthesize biographical material and explain complex historical information in accessible language. The project culminated in a school showcase in February 2025, where students presented their applications to families, school leaders, community members, and some of the people featured in their work.

These details come from the educator's first-person account published by EdSurge. They illustrate how the project was organized, but they should not be interpreted as independent evidence that this teaching model produces better academic outcomes than conventional computer science instruction.

Why Connecting Coding With Civic History Matters

1. It gives technical skills a meaningful purpose

A programming assignment can teach students how to build an interface or display information. A community-history project adds another layer: students must consider what information matters, who the intended audience is, and why the finished product deserves to exist.

Those questions help connect technical decisions with human needs. Students may discover, for example, that an application with impressive visual effects is less useful than a simpler one that allows users to navigate historical records easily and understand where the information came from.

2. It brings research and evidence into computer science

Creating a historical application requires more than writing code. Students must distinguish documented facts from interpretation, compare sources, verify names and dates, and decide which details are necessary to explain a person's contribution.

This is especially important when working with local history, where information may be distributed across archival collections, oral histories, museums, libraries, and community records.

The coding project becomes stronger when students can explain not only how an application works, but also why its content is reliable and how they handled conflicting or incomplete evidence.

3. It makes the audience part of the learning process

A project intended for classmates, families, or community members creates a reason to test whether an application is understandable and accessible. Students can observe where users struggle, gather feedback, and revise their designs.

This provides an opportunity to discuss whose stories are represented, whose perspectives may be missing, and how digital presentation choices influence what an audience notices.

However, meaningful civic engagement should not be measured simply by whether students build an application or display it at an event. Educators should also examine the quality of students' research, the reasoning behind their design decisions, and whether they can explain the project's significance and limitations.

A Practical Framework for Schools

Schools interested in this approach do not need to reproduce the Birmingham project exactly. They can adapt the underlying principles to local history, public information, accessibility, environmental concerns, or other community issues suited to students' ages and learning objectives.

The following framework is an editorial recommendation for designing a classroom project. It is not a tested intervention or a framework formally evaluated by the EdSurge article.

Step 1: Start With a Specific Community Question

Teachers and students should identify a focused question before choosing a technology. Examples might include how a local historical event shaped a community, how residents access public information, or whether a school resource is easy for people with disabilities to use.

A clearly defined question gives students a basis for deciding what information to collect, who needs the finished product, and how its usefulness can be evaluated.

Step 2: Research Before Building

Students should collect information from credible sources such as libraries, museums, official archives, published research, and interviews conducted with appropriate consent. They should record where each important claim originated and distinguish primary sources from later interpretations.

Teachers can ask students to support important biographical claims with more than one reliable source when feasible. If sources disagree, students should document the disagreement rather than quietly selecting the version that best fits their application.

Step 3: Design for Real Users

Before coding, students should sketch the application's screens, organize its content, and identify the needs of its intended audience. They should consider readable text, clear navigation, alternative text for meaningful images, captions for relevant video, and accessible color choices.

A short usability test with classmates or invited community members can reveal problems that are not obvious to the developers. Feedback should lead to documented improvements rather than being collected solely for a final presentation.

Step 4: Build, Test, and Revise

Students can use the programming language and tools appropriate to their experience. The emphasis should be on applying concepts such as data organization, interface design, conditional logic, navigation, and debugging to solve the project's specific problem.

Teachers should assess the functionality of the software alongside the quality of its content. A visually polished application should not receive the highest evaluation if its historical claims are inaccurate or its sources cannot be checked.

Step 5: Present the Work and Explain Its Limitations

Students should demonstrate their applications to an intended audience and explain what they learned, which decisions they made, and what they would improve. They should also identify information they could not verify and any perspectives that may be missing.

This final reflection helps distinguish a civic technology project from a conventional coding assignment with a historical theme added to it.

The Role of AI: A Research Assistant, Not an Authority

Generative AI can help students organize large amounts of text, generate questions for further investigation, or create an initial summary of complex material. These capabilities may be useful in projects that involve historical records and biographical information.

But AI-generated summaries can omit context, introduce factual errors, or present uncertain claims with unwarranted confidence. Historical content may also involve contested interpretations, sensitive personal information, and communities whose experiences have not been adequately represented in available digital records.

For these reasons, AI output should be treated as a draft requiring verification, not as a source of historical authority. Students should return to the underlying documents, cite the sources that support their claims, and revise summaries that distort meaning or remove important context.

Teachers should also establish rules for handling personal information, interviews, photographs, copyrighted material, and AI services. Students should understand when permission is required, what information should not be uploaded to external tools, and how AI assistance should be disclosed under school policy.

Used responsibly, AI can become an opportunity to teach source evaluation and critical thinking. Used without oversight, it can make inaccurate information appear polished and authoritative.

How Should Teachers Evaluate These Projects?

A project that combines computer science and civic learning needs assessment criteria that reflect both. Evaluating code alone overlooks the research and social reasoning that make the assignment distinctive. Evaluating enthusiasm alone, meanwhile, does not show whether students have mastered the intended technical skills.

The following assessment model is a suggested starting point for teachers, not a validated grading instrument.

• Technical quality: Does the application work, and can students explain their code and design choices?
• Research quality: Are important claims supported by credible, traceable sources?
• Historical context: Does the application explain why the subject matters without oversimplifying complex events?
• User experience: Can the intended audience navigate and understand the application?
• Ethical judgment: Have students considered consent, privacy, representation, accessibility, and the responsible use of AI?
• Reflection: Can students describe limitations, respond to feedback, and identify specific improvements?

Teachers can adapt the relative importance of these criteria to the students' age, curriculum, and learning objectives. The purpose is to make expectations explicit before the project begins and ensure that technical and civic learning are both assessed.

What the Example Does—and Does Not—Establish

Clark's account demonstrates one way a teacher connected computer science with local civil rights history. It provides concrete details about the application's structure, the use of research materials, AI-assisted summarization, and a public student showcase.

It does not establish how much the project improved students' coding proficiency, historical knowledge, civic participation, or long-term engagement. The article does not report a controlled comparison with another teaching approach or standardized outcome measures that would support those conclusions.

This distinction does not make the example less useful. It clarifies what other educators can reasonably take from it: a practical project model worth adapting and evaluating, rather than a guaranteed formula for improving student outcomes.

Schools that adopt similar projects could strengthen the evidence by documenting students' technical work before and after the unit, evaluating the accuracy of their research, collecting structured feedback from users, and reflecting on which parts of the teaching approach were most useful.

Conclusion: Teach Students to Build With Purpose

Computer science education can do more than prepare students to write functional software. When technical learning is connected to history and community needs, students have an opportunity to examine how information is represented, who benefits from a design, and what responsibilities come with building digital tools for others.

The Birmingham classroom project described by Tambra Clark offers a concrete example of this approach. Its value lies not in proving that every school should follow the same model, but in showing how a programming assignment can become an opportunity for research, design, collaboration, and public communication.

For educators, the challenge is to preserve the rigor of computer science while making room for evidence-based inquiry and ethical judgment. Students should learn to write code that works, verify information before publishing it, listen to the people their work is intended to serve, and recognize the limits of their own solutions.

Technology education becomes more meaningful when students learn not only how to build digital products, but also how to evaluate the consequences of what they build.

Sources and References

1. Clark, Tambra. EdSurge. "How Coding Can Cultivate Deep Civic Engagement." October 7, 2026. Read the original article. Primary source for the Birmingham classroom project described in this report.
2. International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). ISTE Standards for Educators. Read the official standards. A professional reference for designing authentic learning activities, using technology to support learning, and developing computational and design thinking.
3. International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). Computational Thinking Competencies. Explore the resource. A reference for integrating computational thinking into learning across disciplines.

Editorial note: This article draws on an educator's published account of a classroom project and supplements it with practical analysis and suggested teaching methods. The proposed project framework and assessment criteria are editorial recommendations, not findings independently validated by the original report.