Meet the AI4ALL Team: Sarah Judd, Curriculum Manager

As told to Nicole Halmi by Sarah Judd

  • AI4ALL News
Meet the AI4ALL Team: Sarah Judd, Curriculum Manager

We are excited to welcome Sarah Judd to the AI4ALL team. Sarah joins us as the Curriculum Manager for AI4ALL Open Learning, where she will lead the development of the Open Learning curriculum and facilitator support resources. Sarah joins us at our newly-launched New York office.

Sarah has worked as a computer science teacher in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms at Title I schools in the Northeastern US. She has also worked as a curriculum developer for Google CS First and Girls Who Code, where she created inclusive and culturally responsive computer science curricula. Earlier, she worked as a web engineer and earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA.

Read on to learn more about Sarah’s perspective, her role models, and what she loves about theater and role-playing games.


What motivated you to join AI4ALL?

I think AI is super cool and fun! Beyond that, I’ve been seeing that when many people hear about AI, they are afraid of things like the Terminator and not algorithmic bias. They may not know that the Terminator is not really going to happen, and that algorithmic bias is already negatively affecting people. I wanted to work to create more exposure to AI so that people can know what warrants their fear and where we need to make changes in AI.

I was also excited that AI4ALL is focused on equity, access, and inclusion. I believe in empowering people to be part of a technology that is used in so many different contexts. It is important to have more voices making the software, more voices understanding the software. AI4ALL is a place that I am mission-aligned with — it seems like an excellent place to grow professionally, and the organization is doing work that I thoroughly believe in.

What are some of the bigger issues you see acting as barriers to getting more underrepresented people into AI?

It’s so important to include more people in AI. Only you will see the problems that only you will see. So you need to have AI as a tool in your backpack to be able to solve the kinds of problems that only you know about from your unique vantage point.

That being said, I see a lot of concern that AI is not a welcoming space. Regardless of whether the people already in the room are trying to be welcoming and open, it’s still hard. If you’re one of the only people who look like you in the room, that’s still going to be intimidating and hard. Though we certainly can’t argue with the data about who is represented in the field, one of the things that I try to do in every curriculum that I am involved in this is to show that there are a diversity of people already doing awesome things in computer science and AI. I think a lot of people don’t know to look for those people. AI4ALL is particularly cool for actively seeking out diverse role models for our students, recognizing that these role models exist, and helping more people recognize that they exist.

How do your experiences in engineering, teaching, and CS curriculum development for online platforms inform your work at AI4ALL?

As a teacher, I’ve had firsthand experience learning what is needed to make curriculum work in the classroom. This experience has given me I have a lot of empathy and understanding for teachers that I’m not sure I’d be able to have if I hadn’t ever been in the classroom.

I’ve also worked on online curriculum with CS First, for example. That experience was actually similar to what we’re doing here. We were taking a concept that was scary to a lot of people at the time — teachers didn’t really know what they were getting themselves into when they wanted to teach their students computer science. The CS First curriculum was meant to demystify computer science, make it super easy to teach in your class, and give kids an idea of the impact of computer science in a broad range of fields. We’re at a similar stage with AI right now where it’s just starting to get incorporated into classrooms, but a lot of teachers don’t yet feel equipped to teach it.

Also, I’ve had an equity focus since the beginning. When I was in high school, my family moved into a better-resourced community and I noticed that I suddenly had way more access to computer science education. Noticing this inequity in terms of who had access to what kind of education drove me to get into education as an adult.

Who were your role models growing up? Do you have any role models now?

My mother introduced me to Amelia Earhart and Sojourner Truth very early on — I think when I was in first grade. Both of these women were very much about the idea that there is nothing that women can’t do. Later on, when I walked into computer science classrooms where I was one of the few people who were not men, I drew on the stories of Sojourner Truth and Amelia Earhart. I think my early exposure to the idea that women can do anything helped me think and work through those experiences.

Now, one of my big role models is Grace Hopper. She was big into questioning the status quo — she had a backwards clock on her desk to remind her that the most dangerous phrase in the English language is “we’ve always done it this way.” Also, she had an excellent sense of humor! If you get the chance, you should watch her interview with David Letterman. In the interview, she talks quite a bit about the power and the promise of the young people she is working with. She was always very big on empowering others with the knowledge that she had. That’s a thing I’ve tried to do.

What do you do for fun?

Alright, so I am a total geek. My favorite thing is board games, particularly the big, complicated ones. I also like role-playing games and live-action role-playing games, because they let me be a character and try on the qualities and perspective of that character for a while. I love theater too. I like having a window into another world that theater gives you.


About Sarah

Sarah Judd is the Curriculum Manager for Open Learning at AI4ALL. Sarah brings a track record of creating inclusive and culturally responsive CS curriculum in her roles as a Computer Science teacher in classrooms ranging from 2nd-10th grade, as a curriculum developer at Google CS First and Girls Who Code, and in after-school programs including Bootstrap and FIRST robotics. Sarah has also worked as a web engineer, and holds a BS in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

 

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