Development of a game-design workshop girls' interest towards computing through exploration to promote young identity

Date

2017-05-01

Author

Çakır, Nur
Foster, Aroutis
Lee, Frank J.

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

153
views

0
downloads

Despite recent improvements, women remain underrepresented in Computer Science (CS) in both industry and higher education. Self-perception and identity play an important role in young women's opinions of careers in CS. We believe that by presenting software programming in a way that facilitates identity exploration early on, young girls will be more likely to consider careers in CS later in life. In partnership with an organization that focuses on technology education for middle school girls we developed a game design workshop in an effort to change young girls' perception of CS by increasing their knowledge of programming and empowering them to develop their own identities as computer scientists. This paper presents the results of a case study with 21 participants that was carried out to evaluate the workshop's short-term influence on young girls' attitudes towards CS. The study employed a mixed methods design, including a pre and post application of a validated survey instrument, focus-group interviews, and content analysis of games developed by the students. The pre and post surveys focused on how students' attitudes towards computing may have been influenced by their participation in the workshop; the focus-group interviews aimed to gain further insight into their workshop experience; and the content analysis of games focused on the learning outcomes of our workshop. The findings suggest that the workshop resulted in improvements in both young girls' attitudes towards CS as well as in their self-reported confidence and competence with computers. These results highlight the importance of providing positive identity exploration opportunities in shaping female students' attitudes towards CS. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/70244

Journal

COMPUTERS & EDUCATION

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2017.02.002

Collections

Department of Educational Sciences, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Uncovering the relationship between student engagement and organizational culture in a public university in Turkey Borhan, Ersan.; Emil, Serap; Department of Educational Administration and Planning Education (2020) Student engagement has become a seminal phenomenon in recent higher education studies since it is associated with both desirable student outcomes and the quality of higher education policies and practices. It is defined as the time and energy devoted by the students to their studies and institutional efforts to create effective educational environment. Although the literature has given in-depth comprehension about the role of organizational characteristics in engagement, there has been few studies touching ...
Secondary school students’ programming and computational thinking skills: traditional and interdisciplinary approaches to teaching programming Altın, Rükiye; Tokel, Saniye Tuğba; Department of Computer Education And Instructional Technology (2021-2-15) The focus on K-12 Computer Science education has increased in line with today’s need for a population skilled in computational thinking, and with the growth in careers that are within or at least related to the field of computer science. As such, young learners should be introduced to computer science from an early age, as programming is now considered by many to be an indispensable change to traditional learning methods, and is seen as playing a significant role in the future career choices of most school-...
Development and Validation of Formative Feedback Perceptions Scale in Project Courses for Undergraduate Students Sat, Mustafa (2017-01-01) There has been an increasing trend towards project-based approach in higher education. For that reason, assessing and evaluating students' perceptions on formative feedback becomes an important aspect of students' learning in groupwork. Valid and reliable instruments are required to measure how students perceive formative feedback given to them from multiple sources. Therefore, the aim of the current study is to develop and validate a multidimensional formative feedback perception scale (FFPS) for the asses...
What if we were twice as close to the sun? Findings from a Science Summer Camp Serving Delialioğlu, Ömer (2019-08-30) Diversity has been a prevalent issue in the American STEM workforce for a number of years. Efforts to increase diversification have resulted in alternate learning spaces such as makerspaces, after school programs, and technology integrated curriculums. Our study, hosted at a non-profit organization serving underrepresented youth, leveraged the video game Minecraft (MC) as a way to engage summer campers in scientific concepts and inquiries over one week. Reoccurring themes from interviews include familial ru...
Analysis of graph and text representation techniques for news recommendation and news classification Ağrıman, Mustafa; Karagöz, Pınar; Department of Computer Engineering (2022-2-07) Developments in computer science leads to increase in the use of software applications in all areas of life. This also causes an increase in data usage. Applications using textual data involves tasks such as finding similarities between texts, detecting events from texts, and classifying texts. However, using graphs and graph vectors can be more successful than textual methods of representing textual information, due to capability to express additional features and complex relationships in graph structure. ...

Citation Formats

N. Çakır, A. Foster, and F. J. Lee, “Development of a game-design workshop girls’ interest towards computing through exploration to promote young identity,” COMPUTERS & EDUCATION, pp. 115–130, 2017, Accessed: 00, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/70244.