The past decade has seen a growing number of K-12 computer science curricula that are culturally relevant and responsive to a diverse range of students. Given that teachers are the experts on their own students, empowering teachers to customize instructional materials to draw on the cultural identities and personal experiences of their students can be a powerful strategy for creating effective culturally responsive materials. However, this process can be challenging and time-consuming.

Through a series of participatory design sessions with 5th-8th grade teachers, we identified challenges teachers face when trying to customize instructional materials to be responsive to the students in their classrooms. Our qualitative analysis of these design sessions reveals three primary challenges: (1) completing the customization process in a timely way, (2) meeting the technical learning goals of the original curriculum, and (3) supporting teachers’ personalized culturally responsive pedagogy goals. Additionally, as part of the design sessions, we collaboratively and iteratively designed a set of cognitive and practical scaffolds to support teachers in brainstorming and integrating culturally responsive themes specific to their students and classrooms into an existing structured computer science curriculum. This paper presents both the challenges and the scaffolds for resolving them. In doing so, we contribute a model for supporting teachers in creating customized computing instructional materials that draw on the prior knowledge and cultural resources present in particular classrooms.