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Identifying Pathways to Computer Science : The Long-Term Impact of Short-Term Game Programming Outreach Interventions
- Publication Year :
- 2019
- Publisher :
- Association for Computing Machinery, 2019.
-
Abstract
- Short-term outreach interventions are conducted to raise young students’ awareness of the computer science (CS) field. Typically, these interventions are targeted at K–12 students, attempting to encourage them to study CS in higher education. This study is based on a series of extra-curricular outreach events that introduced students to the discipline of computing, nurturing creative computational thinking through problem solving and game programming. To assess the long-term impact of this campaign, the participants were contacted and interviewed two to five years after they had attended an outreach event. We studied how participating in the outreach program affected the students’ perceptions of CS as a field and, more importantly, how it affected their educational choices. We found that the outreach program generally had a positive effect on the students’ educational choices. The most prominent finding was that students who already possessed a “maintained situational interest” in CS found that the event strengthened their confidence in studying CS. However, many students were not affected by attending the program, but their perceptions of CS did change. Our results emphasize the need to provide continuing possibilities for interested students to experiment with computing-related activities and hence maintain their emerging individual interests.
- Subjects :
- General Computer Science
Higher education
kiinnostus
media_common.quotation_subject
Psychological intervention
tietojenkäsittelytieteet
Education
peliohjelmointi
Intervention (counseling)
Perception
ComputingMilieux_COMPUTERSANDEDUCATION
media_common
ta113
Medical education
Game programming
Event (computing)
business.industry
Computational thinking
interest development
long-term impact
Outreach
game programming
koulutus
computer science education
business
K–12
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....279288876d88099cccb9f7701f9ab1ca