It is widely agreed that there is a need to excite more school students about computing. Considering teachers' views about student engagement is important to securing their support for any solution. We therefore present the results of a qualitative, questionnaire-based study on teachers' perceptions of the best ways to make the subject interesting. From 115 responses by UK computing teachers emerged a range of themes about the issues they felt were most important. We found that whilst their views reflected a range of approaches that are widely promoted in the literature and in national initiatives, there were also disconnects between teachers' views and wider discourses. Based on the results, we give specific recommendations for areas where more should be done to support teachers in making computing interesting to school students. Academics should do more to engage with teachers, especially if they wish to introduce deep computing principles in schools. Teachers expressed an interest in computing clubs in schools, but a strong support network for them is still needed. This may be an opportunity for businesses and universities to help support teachers.
An effective approach to engaging young women to take computing in higher education is to provide examples of successful female computer scientists. Can a print publication that combines core computing concepts with inspiring stories of women in the field be effective? In this paper, we describe a campaign that distributed a 60-page booklet on women in computing to UK secondary schools. We analyse the initial response from teachers, and draw some general conclusions from the project. Teachers expressed strong enthusiasm for the booklet, and also report the desire for recruitment and retention of girls in their computing programmes. They had confidence in the potential for this booklet to inspire young women to take computing.
There are a variety of initiatives to attract secondary school students to computer science. cs4fn is one such project. It combines a magazine, website and live shows, telling stories about computer science in spirited and creative ways. Here we focus on the use of the magazine and, using sociolinguistic discourse analysis, we analyze comments from students and teachers to understand why they have requested (free) subscriptions to the magazine and how they plan to use it. Our analysis shows that both students and teachers are attracted to the flexibility that cs4fn provides, and use it in a variety of learning contexts. We find that the flexibility of the magazine makes it a valuable tool to engage students and teachers and that they use it to further enthuse others (i.e., other students and teachers). We suggest that cs4fn magazine is a powerful form of outreach and that this approach can be widely disseminated within computer science and other academic disciplines, raising the profile of computing to both students and teachers, and spreading enthusiasm for computer science.
A major challenge facing secondary schools is to encourage students to take computing courses. One approach is to invite external speakers from universities or industry to give lectures. The cs4fn project, a large UK-based initiative to enthuse students about computer science, includes this approach. Speakers from Queen Mary, University of London, visit schools to talk to students about computer science research. Our interactive talks tell engaging research-based stories on topics such as artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction as well as using magic tricks to illustrate computing principles. We asked teachers to complete post-talk surveys online; in particular we were interested in whether they believed students' perceptions of the subject had changed. They reported that their students' views of computer science were improved, and that they felt students were more likely to take classes in computing in the future as a result of the talk.
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