grace hopper conference 2008 poster presentation
TRANSCRIPT
For Better or For Worse:Is What We Are Doing Right?
0
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
Female Male
EnrolmentMathematics, Computer & Information Science
HOW?Design of Study
Because there are multiple variables that can contribute to the issues at hand, we need to eliminate variables to look at each time.
Jennifer WongDepartment of Computer Science
Univeristy of [email protected]
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
- Abraham Lincoln
INTRODUCTIONMany initiatives have risen in response to an enrolment decrease in Computer Science. However, many questions and challenges still remain unresolved. Initiatives have been designing and deploying activities and pedagogy, but how do we know we are actually recruiting and retaining instead of dejecting students? This poster will address various issues and attempt to answer some of these issues and challenges.
WHY?Motivations
WHERE?References[1]! Z. Dodds, R. libeskind-Hadas, C. Alvarado, and G. Kuenning. Evaluating a breadth-first cs 1 for scientists.
SIGCSE Bull., 40(1):266-270, March 2008.[2]!T. M. Rao and S. Mitra. An early software engineering approach to teaching cs1, cs2 and ai. SIGCSE Bull.,
40(1):143-147, March 2008.[3]!L. Malka, W. Shenkenfelder, D. Sprague, J. Wong, E. Soroush, S. Marczak, and A. Hamidi. Teaching Senior
Citizens to Use the Internet: A Student Engagement. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education (WCCCE) Conference, May 2008.
[4]!University enrolment, pages 5-9, October 2005.[5]! J. Wong, A. Walker, U. Stege, Y. Coady, A. Agah-St. Pierre, and C. Gibbs. Workshop on evaluating impact and
identifying measures of success: when are outreach initiatives successful? In CCWESTT ’08: Proceedings of the 12th Canadian Coalition of Women in Engineering, Science, Trades, and Technology conference, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, May 2008.
WHEN?Related Work
WHO?Pilot Study: Variable Age
2 case study scenarios: Children learning Computer Science concepts Seniors learning how to use the Internet (details in [3])
Qualitative Findings:Children Seniors
Attention
Reassurance
Willingness to Explorer
More MoreLess MoreMore Less
Outcome hypothesis:
While the traditional form of teaching may attract the older group, the additional “fun” component may be more appealing to the younger group.
WHAT?The Next Step
Part of the initiative should be dedicated to evaluation More pilot case studies to look at other variables
Lego Blocks
Scratch Puzzle Piece
Normal Java
VSJava Python
VS
[1]
[2]
[4]
Result
Case Studies Variables Hypotheses Control Experiments
Age
Gender
Seniors learning new skills
Children learning CS concepts (boys&girls)
Case Study m
Control Experiment
1
Control Experiment
2
Control Experiment
5
Children learning CS concepts (boys only)
Children learning CS concepts (girls only)
Comfort Level (Environment)
Control Experiment
3
Role Models
Concepts vs Examples
Control Experiment
4
Learning Style
Self Efficacy
Hypothesis 2
See “WHO?” section
Hypothesis 3
Hypothesis 4
Hypothesis 5
Hypothesis 6
Hypothesis 7
Control Experiment
6
Control Experiment
7
Mix-Method Approach [5]