In this episode of One Voice in CS, host Julie York talks with Anthony Barba, a 26-year teaching veteran and CS teacher at East Valley High in Yakima, Washington, about the “disengagement gap” — a 2025 Brookings Institution finding that only 26% of 10th graders find school interesting or relevant. Anthony walks through the four modes of student engagement (passenger, achiever, resister, explorer) and shares how a trauma-informed, choice-driven classroom — physical computing tools, calming aesthetics, student-set grading benchmarks, and his “untutorial” approach with tiered technical menus — can move students toward the explorer mode. He also discusses shifting the teacher’s role from technical expert to “lead designer,” and describes using AI (via the PRIM model: predict, run, investigate/modify, make) to help students debug and deepen their understanding while giving teachers more bandwidth in a classroom of 27–30 students.