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 young females, prior work has identified gender-specific differences in the programming behavior of young learners. Since pair programming, which turns programming into a more sociable activity, has been proposed as an approach to support programming education, in this paper we aim to investigate whether similar gender-specific characteristics can also be observed during pair programming. Therefore, we designed a gender-neutral introductory Scratch programming course tailored for integrating pair programming principles, and conducted it with a total of 139 students aged between 8 and 14 years. To identify gender-dependent differences and similarities, we measure the attitude towards programming and the course setting, observe the behavior of the students while programming, and analyze the code of the programs for different gender-combinations. Overall, our study demonstrates that pair programming is well suited for young learners and results in a positive attitude. While the resulting programs are similar in quality and complexity independent of gender, differences are evident when it comes to the compliance to pair programming roles, the exploration of code, and the creative customization of programs. These findings contribute to an in-depth understanding of social and technical gender specifics of pair programming, and provide educators with resources and guidance for implementing gender-sensitive pair programming in the classroom.
Software development teams have to face stress caused by deadlines, staff turnover, or individual differences in commitment, expertise, and time zones. While students are typically taught the theory ...of software project management, their exposure to such stress factors is usually limited. However, preparing students for the stress they will have to endure once they work in project teams is important for their own sake, as well as for the sake of team performance in the face of stress. Team performance has been linked to the diversity of software development teams, but little is known about how diversity influences the stress experienced in teams. In order to shed light on this aspect, we provided students with the opportunity to self-experience the basics of project management in self-organizing teams, and studied the impact of six diversity dimensions on team performance, coping with stressors, and positive perceived learning effects. Three controlled experiments at two universities with a total of 65 participants suggest that the social background impacts the perceived stressors the most, while age and work experience have the highest impact on perceived learnings. Most diversity dimensions have a medium correlation with the quality of work, yet no significant relation to the team performance. This lays the foundation to improve students' training for software engineering teamwork based on their diversity-related needs and to create diversity-sensitive awareness among educators, employers and researchers.
One of the greatest challenges in early programming education is to achieve learning success while also creating initial interest. This is particularly difficult for girls, who continue to be ...affected by persistent societal stereotypes and negative perceptions, inhibiting their long-term interest in programming. A promising approach to address this challenge and to increase motivation for girls is to use programming as a vehicle to express creativity rather than focusing on technical aspects, for example by teaching basic programming concepts through music composition. While music programming has been confirmed to appeal to young learners in general, the question of whether the gender-specific differences on the perceptions and effects known from other programming approaches persist for music programming. To shed light on this question, we conducted an introductory programming course using the popular music programming environment Sonic Pi with a total of 134 students aged 13 to 16, collecting data on students' affections and stereotypical beliefs towards programming, their contributions during lessons, as well as basic comprehension. While we find that music programming leads to similar comprehension and contributions between genders, we observe a significant increase of interest and self-efficacy among girls, and a significant deconstruction of stereotypical attributes associated with programmers.
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 many such endeavours to move to an online setting. While the gender-dependent differences in programming courses have been studied previously, for example revealing that girls may feel safer in same-sex groups, much less is known about gender-specific differences in online programming courses. In order to investigate whether gender-specific differences can be observed in online courses, we conducted an online introductory programming course for Scratch, in which we observed the gender-specific characteristics of participants with respect to how they interact, their enjoyment, the code they produce, and the creativity exposed by their programs. Overall, we observed no significant differences between how girls participated in all-female vs. mixed groups, and girls generally engaged with the course more actively than boys. This suggests that online courses can be a useful means to avoid gender-dependent group dynamics. However, when encouraging creative freedom in programming, girls and boys seem to fall back to socially inherited stereotypical behavior also in an online setting, influencing the choice of programming concepts applied. This may inhibit learning and is a challenge that needs to be addressed independently of whether courses are held online.
Diversity in programming education Grasl, Isabella
2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion),
05/2022
Conference Proceeding
Computer science (CS) and especially software engineering (SE) are still predominantly male-dominated domains at all levels---education, academia and industry 4, 6, 7. The impact of this very ...homogeneous group, involved in development and decision-making processes in CS, has become increasingly apparent. Consequently, reports of discrimination against females and other underrepresented groups in the field of CS as well as biases in algorithms have recently received public and research attention 9, 26, 40. In contrast, research shows that SE benefits from diversity since diverse teams have a higher performance and collaboration as well as being more creative and innovative 8, 10, 37.
Computer science related topics are increasingly introduced at elementary school level, aiming not only to establish basic knowledge, but also to foster affective aspects such as motivation or ...self-efficacy. While corrective feedback is helpful to achieve the former, it may negatively impact the latter. This raises the question on how to provide feedback in an encouraging way that makes learners feel competent but also autonomous. To shed light on this question, we conducted a robotics course with 45 children aged nine to eleven years, in which we studied their preferences when given a choice of either solving a problem themselves (with only a hint from the tutor) or being given the solution directly.We find that children like the freedom of choice and slightly prefer solving their problems themselves, which in turn is significantly correlated with a higher improvement in self-efficacy for building and programming robots. Interestingly, however, only girls exhibit a significant correlation with resulting knowledge on building, and only eleven year old children with resulting knowledge on programming. These insights allow us to provide concrete recommendations on how to give feedback and involve elementary school children and their preferences to promote both knowledge and self-efficacy.
Diversity and Teamwork in Student Software Teams Graßl, Isabella; Krusche, Stephan; Fraser, Gordon
Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Software Engineering Education,
06/2023
Conference Proceeding
Diversity is becoming an increasingly relevant topic in software engineering. A higher diversity rate in professional software teams has been shown to positively influence communication, innovation, ...and performance. Understanding whether similar effects exist in software development teams at an educational level would be important to identify potential challenges and opportunities that might affect students at later professional stages. Therefore, in this paper we investigate the impact of diversity on key teamwork skills such as communication, collaboration, and productivity in student software development teams. In particular, we conducted several surveys on project work progress throughout an introductory software engineering course with students and their tutors regarding these teamwork metrics. We investigate how the self-assessments and the project outcomes relate to seven aspects of diversity, and find correlations between teamwork satisfaction and team diversity. We see deteriorations in certain teamwork metrics over the project timeline—independently of the team diversity. Our findings suggest that the impact of diversity on student teams may be more complex than on professional teams: diversity minorities in teams may feel frustrated more easily. Consequently, it is important to ensure that software development courses maintain motivation and decrease possible frustrations regarding teamwork.
Computational thinking is increasingly introduced at primary school level, usually with some form of programming activity. In particular, educational robots provide an opportunity for engaging ...students with programming through hands-on experiences. However, primary school teachers might not be adequately prepared for teaching computer science related topics, and giving feedback to students can often be challenging: Besides the content of the feedback (e.g., what problems have to be handled), the way the feedback is given is also important, as it can lead to negative emotional effects. To support teachers with the way of giving feedback on common problems when teaching programming with robotics, we conducted a study consisting of seven workshops with three third and four fourth grade primary school classes. Within seven different activities, the 116 primary school children first programmed the Ozobot Evo robot in the pen-and-paper mode and then on a digital device. Throughout these activities we collected data on the problems the students encountered, the feedback given, and the fun they experienced. Our analysis reveals eight categories of problems, which we summarise in this paper together with corresponding possible feedback. We observed that problems that are urgent or can harm the students’ self-efficacy have a negative impact on how enjoyable an activity is perceived. While direct instruction significantly decreased the experienced fun, hints had a positive effect. Generally, we found programming the Ozobot Evo to be encouraging for both girls and boys. To support teachers, we discuss ideas for giving encouraging feedback on common problems of Ozobot Evo programming activities and how our findings transfer to other robots.
Scratch as social network Graßl, Isabella; Fraser, Gordon
2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society (ICSE-SEIS),
05/2022
Conference Proceeding
Open access
Societal matters like the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement influence software engineering, as the recent debate on replacing certain discriminatory terms such as whitelist/blacklist has shown. ...Identifying relevant and trending societal matters is important, and often done for traditional social media channels such as Twitter. In this paper we explore whether this type of analysis can also be used for introspection of the software world, by looking at the thriving scene of Scratch programmers. The educational programming language Scratch is not only used for teaching programming concepts, but also offers a platform for young programmers to express and share their creativity on any topics of relevance. By automatically analyzing titles and project comments in a dataset of 106.032 Scratch projects, we explore which topics are common in the Scratch community, whether socially relevant events are reflected, and how the sentiment in the comments discussing these topics is. It turns out that the diversity of topics within the Scratch projects makes the analysis process challenging. Our results nevertheless show that topics from pop and net culture are present, and even recent societal events such as the Covid-19 pandemic or BLM are to some extent reflected in Scratch. The tone in the comments is mostly positive with catchy youth language. Hence, despite the challenges, Scratch projects can be studied in the same way as social networks, which opens up new possibilities to improve our understanding of the behavior and motivation of novice programmers.
Analyzing the content and emotions within a social network provides insights on how software engineers communicate and what they talk about. The Scratch programming environment is extremely popular with young, learning programmers. In this paper we investigate whether social network analysis in terms of automatically identifying topics and sentiments can also be applied to Scratch. We analyze the topics of the projects that young programmers create and share, and determine the tone of their conversations. Although the process turns out to be technically challenging, we encounter pop and net culture references but also societal matters, and the overall tone of communication is positive.
The widespread establishment of computational thinking in school curricula requires teachers to introduce children to programming already at primary school level. As this is a recent development, ...primary school teachers may neither be adequately prepared for how to best teach programming, nor may they be fully aware why they have to do so. In order to gain a better understanding of these questions, we contrast insights taken from practical experiences with the anticipations of teachers in training. By surveying 200 teachers who have taught programming at primary schools and 97 teachers in training, we identify relevant challenges when teaching programming, opportunities that arise when children learn programming, and strategies how to address both of these in practice. While many challenges and opportunities are correctly anticipated, we find several disagreements that can inform revisions of the curricula in teaching studies to better prepare primary school teachers for teaching programming at primary schools.
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