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Objectives. The increasing demand for computing skills has led to a rapid rise in the development of new computer science (CS) curricula, many with the goal of equitably broadening participation of underrepresented students in CS. While such initiatives are vital, factors outside of the school environment also play a role in influencing students’ interests. In this paper, we examined the effects of students’ perceived parental support on their interest in computer programming and explored the mechanisms through which this effect may have been established as students participated in an introductory CS instructional unit. Participants. This instructional unit was implemented with upper primary (grade 5) school students and was designed to broaden trajectories for participation in CS. The participants in the current study (N=170) came from six classrooms in two rural schools in the western United States. Study Method. The seven-week instructional unit began with students playing a commercial CS tabletop board game that highlighted fundamental programming concepts, and transitioned to having students create their own board game levels in the block-based programming language, Scratch. Further, because the board game could be taken home, the instructional unit offered opportunities to involve the family in school-based CS activities. To investigate the effect of students’ perception of parental (specifically father and mother) support on their interest in and self-efficacy to pursue CS, we surveyed students before and after the unit’s implementations and explored the structural relationship of the data using structural equation modeling (SEM). Results. We present three findings. First, the combined effect of students’ perceived mother’s and father’s support measured prior to the implementation (pre-survey) predicted students’ self-efficacy (Std B = 0.37, SE = 0.010, p < .001) and interest in computer programming (Std B = 0.328, SE = 0.134, p < .003) measured after the implementation (post-survey). Secondly, the combined effect of perceived mother and father support (Std B = 0.132, 95% CI [0.039, 0.399], 99% CI [0.017, 0.542]) on students’ interest was mediated by whether or not they took the CS board game home. Conclusions. Our findings indicate that perceived parental support has the potential to play an important role in students’ self-efficacy and interest in computer programming and that providing opportunities for students to bring CS artifacts home has the potential to further affect students’ interest in computer programming.
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Work in Progress: Mflow, a Flow-based Music Programming Platform for Young Children
Students of all socioeconomic backgrounds love music and express their identity through music. There are strong historical connections between music and computing, and computer-based music has a heavy presence in contemporary popular culture. Thus, programming electronic music can provide the type of authentic learning experience that fosters participation in computer science (CS) by minoritized students. Although important efforts have been made in that direction, they have not reached young children in mainstream public classrooms, particularly in schools serving children from low-income and marginalized backgrounds. Developing a computational tool and educational program that reaches this key demographic holds the potential to greatly increase CS knowledge and participation in the future workforce. For this, our team has created M-flow, a flow-based music programming platform that seeks to be engaging for children from the outset, and that makes it extremely easy for non-specialized teachers to learn and implement CS activities in the classroom.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1657366
- PAR ID:
- 10414877
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2023 IEEE World Engineering Education Conference (EDUNINE)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 4
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/EDUNINE57531.2023.10102852
