Five years of game programming outreach

Abstract

This paper presents lessons learned from five years of teaching a five-day game design and programming outreach course. The course was offered in summer time and targeted at middle and high school students. In total, 462 youngsters have taken part in 21 course instances. We describe our course concept, and discuss our successes and challenges. In particular, we focus on understanding our student populations by presenting descriptives and statistics of the events, and performing a statistical cluster analysis based on pre-and post-surveys. The cluster analysis was complemented with an analysis of the qualitative data, also originating from the surveys. Taken together, students could be classified into five groups with substantial differences: Enthusiasts, Newbies, Uncertains, Experimenters, and Unsatisfieds. Awareness of the clusters helps instructors of similar courses in developing course content, designing differentiated instruction, and planning follow-up or advanced courses.

Computer science club for girls and boys – a survey study on gender differences

“…Many CS outreach activities suffer from the inability to attract an equal number of girl and boy attendees (Isomöttönen Lakanen & Lappalainen, 2014;Topi, 2015). Participant statistics from CS summer workshops by A. J.…”