TY - GEN
T1 - Early programming education and career orientation
T2 - 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE 2019
AU - Aivaloglou, Efthimia
AU - Hermans, Felienne
PY - 2019/2/22
Y1 - 2019/2/22
N2 - Programming education currently begins at the elementary school age. In this paper we are exploring what affects the learning performance of young students in programming classes. We present the results collected during an eight-week experimental Scratch programming course run in elementary schools. We emphasize factors that have been found to affect learning performance in adult students, including self-efficacy and motivation, and measure how they affect students of this age group. We further explore the students' view of programming as a career path, and measure the effects of the course, their performance, and the stereotypes that they assume for computer scientists. We find that students' intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and previous programming experience are important factors, being strongly correlated with their self-efficacy and their inclination towards a CS career. For female students only, we also find CS career orientation to be strongly correlated with their self-efficacy.
AB - Programming education currently begins at the elementary school age. In this paper we are exploring what affects the learning performance of young students in programming classes. We present the results collected during an eight-week experimental Scratch programming course run in elementary schools. We emphasize factors that have been found to affect learning performance in adult students, including self-efficacy and motivation, and measure how they affect students of this age group. We further explore the students' view of programming as a career path, and measure the effects of the course, their performance, and the stereotypes that they assume for computer scientists. We find that students' intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and previous programming experience are important factors, being strongly correlated with their self-efficacy and their inclination towards a CS career. For female students only, we also find CS career orientation to be strongly correlated with their self-efficacy.
KW - CS career orientation
KW - K12
KW - Programming education
KW - Scratch
KW - Self-efficacy
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85064403217
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85064403217#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.1145/3287324.3287358
DO - 10.1145/3287324.3287358
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85064403217
T3 - SIGCSE 2019 - Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
SP - 679
EP - 685
BT - SIGCSE 2019 - Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 27 February 2019 through 2 March 2019
ER -