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Using Informed Design in Informal Computer Science Programs to Increase Youths’ Interest, Self-efficacy, and Perceptions of Parental Support

Published: 02 August 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Our work is situated in research on Computer Science (CS) learning in informal learning environments and literature on the factors that influence girls to enter CS. In this article, we outline design choices around the creation of a summer programming camp for middle school youth. In addition, we describe a near-peer mentoring model we used that was influenced by Bandura's self-efficacy theory. The purpose of this article, apart from promoting transparency of program design, was to evaluate the effectiveness of our camp design in terms of increasing youths’ interest, self-efficacy beliefs, and perceptions of parental support. We found significant gains for all three of these concepts. Additionally, we make connections between our design choices (e.g., videos, peer support, mentor support) and the affective gains by thematically analyzing interview data concerning the outcomes found in our camps.

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        cover image ACM Transactions on Computing Education
        ACM Transactions on Computing Education  Volume 19, Issue 4
        Special Section on ML Education and Regular Articles
        December 2019
        297 pages
        EISSN:1946-6226
        DOI:10.1145/3345033
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Publication History

        Published: 02 August 2019
        Accepted: 01 March 2019
        Revised: 01 March 2019
        Received: 01 July 2018
        Published in TOCE Volume 19, Issue 4

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        1. Informal CS learning environments
        2. block-based programming
        3. near-peer mentors

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