An Open Curriculum Draft By Henry Fan · Student Researcher Mentored by Jeff Anderson
Curriculum Proposal · Three Courses · Open Draft
Teaching
Computing
Differently.

A student-authored proposal for three community-college CS courses — Intro AI, Intro ML, and Data Structures & Algorithms — taught from first principles, with equity and community at the center. No required textbook purchases. No exams. All projects. This is an open draft, not an adopted course.

3 Self-Placed Tracks per Course 18 Weeks · Project-Based Ungrading · Portfolio Inspired by Ko · Anderson Freire · hooks All Resources Free & Open
Three Courses
"The most advanced technical skill in these courses is understanding who built a system, for whom, and what it encodes about the world."
Drafting Philosophy · Inspired by Freire, hooks, Ko, Anderson
0
Required Textbooks
0
Exams
3
Tracks per Course
Intellectual Lineage
Amy J. Ko
Equitable, joyous, liberatory computing education. Read before write. Student agency and trust.
Jeff Anderson
Ungrading, deep learning over shallow, Conquering College meta-skills. The 2-minute question rule.
Paulo Freire
Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Students are not empty vessels. Knowledge is a liberatory act.
bell hooks
Teaching to Transgress. The classroom as a site of freedom. Bringing the full self to learning.
Joy Buolamwini
Gender Shades. The coded gaze. Bias in facial recognition and its real-world consequences.
Safiya Umoja Noble
Algorithms of Oppression. Search engines encode power. Information retrieval is never neutral.
Ruha Benjamin
Race After Technology. "Neutral" automation encodes and amplifies racial hierarchy.
Donald Knuth
The Art of Computer Programming. Algorithms are art. Rigor and beauty are not opposites.
Research Context

One draft in a
broader research
program.

This curriculum proposal doesn't stand alone. It is the curriculum-design thread of a three-part research program on equitable community-college computing education I am developing under the mentorship of Jeff Anderson.

The other two threads are empirical (what actually helps community-college students stay in CS?) and methodological (how do you audit a curriculum for whose learning it supports?). The companion hub — the index of papers, working notes, and experiments — is the Modeling Bench.