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I was fortunate to be able to attend the 18th WiPSCE Conference on Primary and Secondary Computing Education Research, hosted in Cambridge in September last year. This international conference "aims to improve the exchange of research and practice relevant to teaching and learning in primary and secondary computing education, teacher training, and related research." I have always been interested in the research behind how and why we teach computing, and this is a really inclusive and welcoming event that isn't purely for academics. 

There were a large number of excellent papers and posters presented over the three days, and the proceedings can be found here: Proceedings of the 18th WiPSCE Conference on Primary and Secondary Computing Education Research | ACM Other conferences. Unfortunately to read the majority of the papers requires access to the ACM library, but there are a few open access ones. Plus below I will summarise those sessions with links to equity, diversity and inclusion in computing, as part of my role as one of the leads for the Gender & Inclusion hub.

Empowering Educators to Design for Equity - Joanna Goode

Joanna delivered the keynote on day 2, and she talked about systemic challenges in the US facing historically underserved communities from accessing computer science. She outlined how educators act as gatekeepers to the subject (as they are the ones recommending students to study CS), and how they often have biases around who should be taking computer science. Joanna was part of a study that was later written up in a book: Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race and Computing that identified at these biases, together with barriers resulting from structural inequalities (few course offerings), lack of professional development for teachers, no common curriculum, and boring/unwelcome content and pedagogy.

She now works to enable teacher leadership and agency in order to address issues of equity, inclusion and justice across computing education, through the co-development of content and resources for a Exploring Computer Science course that would introduce all students to the subject and its impact in all areas of life. The aim is to include more justice-oriented topics, such as disability, colonisation, ecological justice etc, and incorporate universal design to support access.

Role of Confidence & Perceived Usefulness in Female Student Engagement in High School Computing Science - Albakri, Bikanga Ada, Morrison

This study of girls in Saudi Arabia looked at the four dimensions of engagement and their link with confidence and perceived usefulness of studying computer science. The four dimensions are: 

• Behavioural engagement - describes students’ observable behaviour, such as participation in activities.

• Cognitive engagement - refers to using high-level thinking strategies to foster deep understanding.

• Emotional engagement - concerns positive and negative reactions to learning tasks, teachers, classmates - e.g. sense of belonging, excitement about activities, willingness to do work.

• Social engagement - concerns enjoying and participating in or withdrawing from social collaboration with peers.

Results suggested that cognitive engagement may be one of the most important factors to consider in relation to female engagement in Computer Science classes. There was a significant relationship between overall student engagement and confidence - this indicates that students who feel more confident in their ability to learn and succeed in a CS class were more likely to be positively engaged in their learning and vice versa. There was also a moderate positive correlation between overall engagement and perceived usefulness, with a significant relationship between perceived usefulness and cognitive, social and emotional engagement (not behavioural).

Beyond Gender Differences: Can Scratch Programs Indicate Students’ Preferences? - Bentz, Standl

Previous analysis of students’ Scratch projects have shown that girls tend to have a preference for story-telling approaches, and boys for games. Since story-lines require less advanced blocks than games, the girls’ programs  are often of lower complexity. This study looked more at different types of students’ interest, characterised by an interest in people and human surroundings (known as dramatist interest) or things and spatial arrangements (known as patterner interest) - rather than purely gender. It analysed the Scratch projects of a group of 12-14 year olds, identified as patterners, dramatists or mixed preference. Previous studies have shown that patterners show preferences for factual tasks, while dramatists prefer contextual tasks involving collaboration.

When analysing use of blocks in Scratch projects, the results of this study showed:

• Mixed Preference: pupils showed a lower frequency of block usage. Boys in this group generally followed the approaches of the overall group of girls.

• Dramatist: this group utilised many different blocks, with particular use of the looks blocks, and fewer motion and control blocks. Dramatist boys used fewer blocks than patterner boys. Conversely, dramatist girls tended to out-perform the girls in other categories in terms of creating larger programs (albeit with lower difficulty).

• Patterner: Extensive use of motion blocks by boys in this group. Girls use fewer motion blocks. Girls generally used fewer blocks than those in other groups, apart from control blocks.

It was interesting for me to consider how complexity of programs is influenced by the type of projects young people create, and that we need to make sure we can encourage and model more complex use of blocks and structures in all types of project, e.g. creating a choose your own adventure type story, rather than something more linear, would require more complex structures.

Scaffolding Block Coding Through Multiple Entry Points - Barrett, Israel

This poster looked at providing multiple entry points for project creation in Scratch as a way of scaffolding learning (as per the Universal Design for Learning framework). Learners in grades 7 and 8 were provided with a choice about how they interacted with content, giving them greater agency. Increased agency has been correlated with higher achievement. Four entry points were created that students could choose from:

• Play and remix - fully functional program to explore/remix

• Buggy project - incorrect code that needs fixing

• Exploded code - Parson’s Problem

• Spicy extension - an advanced challenge

Results showed that the order of the options affected choice (often they chose the first one), as did perceived difficulty (opting for what they thought was the easiest option) and also the name of the challenge (e.g. many students chose exploded code because it sounded interesting).

The options weren't anything new to me, as I'm a big fan of PRIMM plus debugging and Parson's Problems, but I quite liked the spicy extension option, and the element of choice for learners rather than the teacher always deciding on the type of activity. This could support the confidence and engagement of learners.

What Works for Girls in Computing - Copsey-Blake, Wong, Kemp, Hamer

Another poster session, outlining the qualitative reflections of computing teachers in 4 schools that have a particularly good uptake of girls in GCSE computer science (over 30%). Four key themes emerged from the data that might contribute to the increased uptake (and that are reflected in the gender research review):

1. Supportive team - a department that actively promotes the subject, runs clubs in lower years, a proactive SLT.

2. Creative computing - providing more opportunities for creative computing, modelling teachers' own problem solving and what happens when they make mistakes fostering positive attitudes.

3. Culturally relevant and responsive - tailoring lessons to students’ interests and making them more relevant.

4. Challenging stereotypes - creating an inclusive environment, and challenging stereotypes and misconceptions, introducing relatable role models and celebrating achievements. Working with families to challenge stereotypes.

This is just a few of the papers presented during the conference, and I recommend you dip into the proceedings to see the rest. Next year WiPSCE is being held in Munich, the week before the Beer Festival, in case anyone has an urge to attend: WiPSCE 2024.