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Lessons learned: designing a mobile application for teaching computer science concepts to middle school girls

Published: 06 September 2016 Publication History

Abstract

While the technology field is growing very fast and is important to our day-to-day lives, very few women consider this field as one they would like to pursue. While the reasons for this are primarily cultural, early exposure to these fields is also very important. In this small study, we tested a customized mobile application (App) we designed to teach middle school girls about computer science concepts. We used surveys to determine which content presentation methods were more effective for learning and to find out their perception of the App. We also tracked participants' movements in the App. We found that among our 7 participants, interactive presentation methods seemed to be better for teaching than heavy text-based methods. We also found out that no participant took the same path through the App. We hope the results from this preliminary study will help add to the knowledge of this demographic in both teaching and design work.

References

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Afterschool Alliance. 2011. STEM Learning in Afterschool: An Analysis of Impact and Outcomes. 1--20. Retrieved November 14, 2014 from ERIC: http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED525252
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Kristen Pilner Blair, Jay Pfaffman, Maria Cutumisu, Nicole Hallinen, and Daniel Schwartz. 2015. Testing the Effectiveness of iPad Math Game: Lessons Learned from Running a Multi-Classroom Study. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 727--734. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2702613.2702974
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Donna Milgram. 2011. How to Recruit Women and Girls to the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Classroom. Technology and Engineering Teacher 71, 3: 4--11.
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Kamla Modi, Judy Schoenberg, and Kimberlee Salmond. Generation STEM: What Girls Say about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. 2012. Retrieved November 14, 2014 from Girls Scouts of USA:http://www.girlscouts.org/research/pdf/generation_stem_full_report.pdf
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cover image ACM Conferences
MobileHCI '16: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services Adjunct
September 2016
664 pages
ISBN:9781450344135
DOI:10.1145/2957265
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 06 September 2016

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Author Tags

  1. Android
  2. computer science education
  3. menu layout
  4. mobile development

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