Related papers: Data-driven Analysis of Gender Differences and Sim…
Since computer science is still mainly male dominated, academia, industry and education jointly seek ways to motivate and inspire girls, for example by introducing them to programming at an early age. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has forced…
Young learners are increasingly introduced to programming, and one of the main challenges for educators is to achieve learning success while also creating enthusiasm. As it is particularly difficult to achieve this enthusiasm initially in…
In this paper, we present Scratch Community Blocks, a new system that enables children to programmatically access, analyze, and visualize data about their participation in Scratch, an online community for learning computer programming. At…
Creative approaches to attract students to software engineering at an early age are emerging, yet their differential impact on gender remains unclear. This study investigates whether design thinking's empathy-driven approach addresses the…
Recent studies from all over the world show that more boys than girls play video games. The numbers are different for mobile gaming apps, where 65% of women are identified as gamers. Adapting game design activities for academic purposes is…
Gender stereotypes in introductory programming courses often go unnoticed, yet they can negatively influence young learners' interest and learning, particularly under-represented groups such as girls. Popular tutorials on block-based…
As Computational Thinking (CT) continues to permeate younger age groups in K-12 education, established CT platforms such as Scratch face challenges in catering to these younger learners, particularly those in the elementary school (ages…
Block-based environments are visual programming environments, which are becoming more and more popular because of their ease of use. The ease of use comes thanks to their intuitive graphical representation and structural metaphors…
Although female students engage in coding courses, only a small percentage of them plan to pursue computer science (CS) as a major when choosing a career path. Gender differences in interests, sense-of belonging, self-efficacy, and…
Learning theories emphasize the importance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators in curricula, and games are a promising way to provide both while constructing the game and presenting or sharing it in public or with a community. New…
Recently, workforce shortage has become a popular issue in information technology (IT). One solution to increasing the workforce supply is to increase the number of female IT professionals. This is because there is gender imbalance in…
The importance of programming education has lead to dedicated educational programming environments, where users visually arrange block-based programming constructs that typically control graphical, interactive game-like programs. The…
Context. Code smells, which are recurring anomalies in design or style, have been extensively researched in professional code. However, their significance in block-based projects created by novices is still largely unknown. Block-based…
The number of women in technical fields is far below the average number of males, especially in developed countries. Gender differences in STEM are already present in secondary schools in students aged between 12 to 15 years. Adolescence is…
This paper describes the design and evaluation of DSAScratch, an extension to Scratch, a widely used block-based programming language. The DSAScratch framework implements advanced data structures such as arrays, sets, dictionaries, and…
Block-based programming environments like Scratch are widely used in introductory programming courses. They facilitate learning pivotal programming concepts by eliminating syntactical errors, but logical errors that break the desired…
In recent decades, computer science (CS) has undergone remarkable growth and diversification. Creating attractive, social, or hands-on games has already been identified as a possible approach to get teenagers and young adults interested in…
There has been a significant amount of debate around gender differences in intellectual functioning, however, most of this research concerns typically developing populations and lacks research into atypically developing populations and…
Education motivated the encouragement of female participation in several areas of science and technology. Programming marathons have grown over the years and are events where programmers compete to solve coding challenges. However, despite…
Scratch is a programming environment and an online community where young people can create, share, learn, and communicate. In collaboration with the Scratch Team at MIT, we created a longitudinal dataset of public activity in the Scratch…