Exploring Interest in Informatics with a Focus on K-12 Students' Preferences in the Context of a Robotics Workshop

Autor(en)

Anette Bentz, Bernhard Standl

Abstrakt

Digital literacy is considered to be crucial for social and professional participation. Hence, several projects have been launched in school, as well as extracurricular activities to promote digital literacy in middle school. They aim, among other things, to increase interest in the so-called STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), which include computer science. Interest in a topic is described in the literature as a crucial factor for learning success and career choice. Still, there is a potential for current research on the expression and distribution of interest in computer science. Therefore, this study aims to address this research gap by examining interest in computer science. The exploration of interest is expanded to include gender aspects and pupils' dispositions. Given the significantly lower number of women studying in STEM fields, there is a particular focus on an improved understanding of the interests of female pupils as early as middle school. Moreover, the literature suggests that pupils' dispositions should also be considered in instructional design to achieve stable interest. In this context, the following two dispositions shine out in literature and are therefore focused on in this article: first, interest in contextual, people-related topics (mainly found among women), and second, interest in factual, object-related topics (mainly found among men). In summary, this study investigates how pupils' interest in computer science is expressed before and after a programming intervention and how it is distributed across gender and dispositions. Therefore, the study surveyed 8th-grade pupils (N 114) about their preferences and assessed their interest in computer science before and after an intervention with unplugged materials and playful robots. Results show that all groups of pupils find computer science interesting, and the intervention slightly increased interest. Girls show a marginally lower interest in computer science. Furthermore, the results indicate that interest in computer science did not correlate with interest in contextual or factual dispositions.

Organisation(en)

Externe Organisation(en)

Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe

Journal

ACM Transactions on Computing Education

Band

24

ISSN

1946-6226

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1145/3698239

Publikationsdatum

12-2024

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

503015 Fachdidaktik Technische Wissenschaften

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Allgemeine Computerwissenschaft, Education

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/104dde20-cf15-480e-a986-8a7f7c0b63ae