What is it about?
Teaching and learning programming in college can be tough, especially for newcomers. We know it's important to include more people and make sure everyone gets a chance to become a computing professional. To tackle these challenges, we tried a new way of teaching—putting students at the center of their learning and using a cool tool popular in K-12 classes called Scratch. We wanted to see how well it works and if it makes a difference for different genders.
Featured Image
Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
Why is it important?
In our research, we applied a matching algorithm to form equivalent groups from data collected from four cohorts of first-year computer science students across two academic sessions. This strengthens our ability to attribute improvements in programming performance to the intervention. Our findings align with previous research, indicating the effectiveness of Scratch in enhancing programming learning for college students. Notably, we uncovered that gender differences in computing classes may be linked to factors such as academic background and context rather than solely gender.
Perspectives
Writing this article with colleagues from different countries has been exciting, especially as we worked within a very limited time. It was gratifying that we were lucky to scale through peer review, emphasizing the importance of hard work and team spirit.
Oladele Campbell
Niger State Polytechnic
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Impacts of a Constructionist Scratch Programming Pedagogy on Student Achievement with a Focus on Gender, December 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3576882.3617911.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page