Abstract
Research points at various factors for the low and even decreasing proportion of women in the IT sector in developed countries, e.g., psychological causes, social factors, or structural conditions. These possible explanations all have one thing in common: they recognize adolescence as the essential confidence-building phase in girls. Girls aged 12 to 15 years old seem to lose interest in computer science (CS). Providing mentors and female role models are two key elements to counteract gender stereotypes in CS. “RemoteMentor”, a joint Austrian research project brought these two approaches together and expanded them in the form of “remote tutoring”: female students aged 14 to 15 received one-on-one human support through smartphones for their coding project during their regular CS and arts lessons. The aim of the one year investigation was to analyse gender aspects in the tutoring process and the output of the collaborative coding project. This was done with group discussions, the evaluation of the online tutoring units and an analysis of the final games in regard to the applied Computational Thinking concepts. Results showed that the project was a promising approach to support and motivate at least a certain group of female students in coding.
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Spieler, B., Mikats, J., Valentin, S., Oates-Indruchová, L., Slany, W. (2020). “RemoteMentor” Evaluation of Interactions Between Teenage Girls, Remote Tutors, and Coding Activities in School Lessons. In: Zaphiris, P., Ioannou, A. (eds) Learning and Collaboration Technologies. Designing, Developing and Deploying Learning Experiences. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12205. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50513-4_40
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