Issues of doing gender and doing technology – Music as an innovative theme for technology education

How authors did it – a methodological analysis of recent engineering education research papers in the European Journal of Engineering Education

“…To provide the reader with further insight into our findings, we have selected three exemplars of papers which we believe appropriately address the theoretical and methodological aspects included in our taxonomy: 'Think engineer, think male?' (Male, Bush, and Murray 2009), 'Learning to fly: first experiences on team learning of Icaros cooperative' (Juvonen 2013) and 'Issues of doing gender and doing technology -Music as an innovative theme for technology education' (Thaler and Zorn 2010). These three papers describe research in Australia, Finland and Austria respectively and present a range of methodological approaches, the first employing a statistical analysis of survey data, the second uses a grounded theory approach while the third applies ethnographic research.…”

Engineering perceptions of female and male K-12 students: effects of a multimedia overview on elementary, middle-, and high-school students

“…The pre-existing perceptions results indicate that males and females do not yet differ in their engineering perceptions in elementary school grades 3-5, while females have significantly lower perceptions than males in the middle-and high-school grades 6-12. These results further underscore the need for early exposure to engineering so as to avoid or mitigate girls' negative perceptions of engineering (Hughes 2002;Thaler and Zorn 2010), which can profoundly influence their interest in pursuing engineering careers (Betz and Hacket 1983). Note 1.…”

Youth interests as vehicles for the acquisition of technological competence: Insights from two participatory projects

“…The vehicle theory has been developed by Isabel Zorn and Anita Thaler in the face of an alleged lack of interest young people show for technology [4,5]. As digital natives [6], however, they grow up in a technological civic society [7] where many technologies are embedded/pervasive and not recognised as what they are.…”

“…through which awareness for the embedded technologies and related issues are promoted. In two previous projects with Austrian schools, the vehicle theory has already been successfully tested as a didactical approach -using music as a vehicle to get high school students interested in IT [5,8] and photography as a vehicle to raise awareness for issues of the representations of gender and technology in the media [9].…”

“…UseITsmartly draws on two educational approaches successfully tested in previous projects: the vehicle theory [5] and peer education [10,11]. In order to build capacity for (and get young people involved in) something that seems either little attractive or difficult to access for them on their own, it has to be made accessible via a vehicle [5], i. e. something the target group strongly identifies with or something that is an integral part of their everyday lives.…”