Toward an emergent theory of broadening participation in computer science education

A fundamental challenge to computer science education is the difficulty of broadening participation of women and underserved communities. The idea of game design and game programming as an activity to introduce children at an early age to computational thinking in a motivational way is quickly gaining momentum. A pedagogical approach called Project First has allowed the Scalable Game Design project to reach a large group of middle schools students including a large percentage of female (45%) and underrepresented (48%) students. With over 4000 students in inner city, remote rural, and Native American communities Scalable Game Design has investigated the impact on students' interest level of pedagogical approaches employed by teachers such as mediation and scaffolding. Findings suggest strong gender effects based on classroom scaffolding approaches. For instance, girls are substantially less likely to be motivated through scaffolding based on direct instruction. Conversely, guided discovery scaffolding approaches are highly motivating to the point where they can even overcome other negative predictors such as small girls to boys class participation ratios. This paper introduces the project, discusses different scaffolding approaches and presents data connecting gender specific motivational levels with scaffolding approaches.