Lost in Translation: Gender and High School Computer Science

Abstract

Carolina is one of six females taking the Computer Programming course at East River High School, a predominantly Latino/a high school located in a low-income neighborhood on the east side of Los Angeles. She is one of the top students in her Honors Geometry class and has a strong history of academic achievement, particularly in mathematics and science. Carolina was recruited, along with other similarly strong female mathematics students, by a well-meaning and committed mathematics teacher, who had been assigned to teach Programming and was eager to increase female enrollment in what had been a predominantly male classroom. As the course evolved, the teacher, who was teaching himself programming while running the course, decided to take advantage of the more knowledgeable students by pairing "experts" with "novices." With two exceptions, these pairs included an older, more tech-savvy male-the "big brother"-and a younger, inexperienced female. Despite the girls' high standing in high level mathematics classes, the students quickly fell into "traditional" roles, with girls taking on more "secretarial" tasks. Carolina, who found this arrangement to be frustrating, states: We [the girls] called them "big brothers"….I would type and he [partner] would like think about it-we would both think about it but he would like be the one with the most ideas…I was not always able to understand the ideas. Sometimes I just went along with it.

Gender Stereotypes and Attitudes Towards Information and Communication Technology Professionals in a Sample of Spanish Secondary Students

“…Both North American (Bair and Marcus 2007;Barker and Aspray 2006;Goode et al 2006) and Spanish (Castaño 2011;Sáinz and López-Sáez 2010) research illustrates that ICT education and labor market are particularly male-dominated and very much gender-typed. In Spain, the rate of female university enrollments in computing is decreasing (around 17 %), in contrast to the moderate participation of women in telecommunications engineering (26 %) (Instituto de la Mujer [Women's Institute] 2012).…”

Gender Differences in Elementary School Students’ Game Design Preferences

“…They adopt qualitative research methods, such as observation, interview and work analysis to investigate what students do and learn during game design activities. Mary research papers such as [6], [9], [10] are generated to address the issue of gender preferences in game design. The following is a brief summary of these studies.…”

“…Consequently, many studies (e.g. [6], [9]- [11]) implement game design and multimedia courses in elementary and high schools to investigate gender differences in designing strategies, styles and solving encountered problems.…”

Principles of a debugging-first puzzle game for computing education

“…This framing can contribute to learners' sense of failure if they do not initially succeed [17]. For females (or males) who view the culture of computing as elitist and view themselves as not good enough [13,21], feedback such as their programs being called "invalid" can be discouraging.…”