Abstract
Potentially, the international Bebras Challenge could provide a facility to arouse the enthusiasm of girls for Computer Science. Yet, its effect will depend on the personal success in the challenge, which is likely to correlate with personal motivation. Thus, we have compared the performance of the girls and the boys in the German Bebras challenge of 2014. Overall, the boys were more successful. The differences increase dramatically with the age of the participants. Additionally, we have compared the average performance of boys and girls in every task. It turned out that girls performed better in a certain task, if three conditions of Kellers ARCS model of motivation are met: the tasks have to look nice to attract the attention of the girls, they have to represent a situation relevant for real life, and they have to be comparably easy to solve.
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Hubwieser, P., Hubwieser, E., Graswald, D. (2016). How to Attract the Girls: Gender-Specific Performance and Motivation in the Bebras Challenge. In: Brodnik, A., Tort, F. (eds) Informatics in Schools: Improvement of Informatics Knowledge and Perception. ISSEP 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9973. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46747-4_4
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