skip to main content
10.1145/2462476.2466519acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesiticseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Making computing interesting to school students: teachers' perspectives

Authors Info & Claims
Published:01 July 2013Publication History

ABSTRACT

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.

References

  1. Bell, T., Fellows, M. and Witten, I. 1998. Computer Science Unplugged: Off-line Activities and Games for All Ages. Self-published.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. Bell, T., Curzon, P., Cutts, Q., Dagiene, V. and Haberman, B. 2011. Introducing students to computer science with programmes that don't emphasise programming. In Proceedings of the 16th annual joint conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITiCSE '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 391--391. DOI=10.1145/1999747.1999904 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. Black, J., Curzon, P. and McOwan, P. (editors). 2012. cs4fn: Facing up to faces, Issue 14. 20pp.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  4. Blum, L. and Cortina, T.J. 2007. CS4HS: an outreach program for high school CS teachers. In Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 19--23. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1227310.1227320 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  5. Bradshaw, P. and Woollard, J. 2012. Computing At School: an emergent community of practice for a re-emergent subject. In International Conference on ICT in Education, Rhodes, July.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. Brown, N.C.C., Kölling, M., Crick, T., Peyton-Jones, S., Humphreys, S. and Sentance, S. 2013. Bringing Computer Science Back Into Schools: Lessons from the UK. To appear in The 44th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  7. Creswell, J.W. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. 2nd edition. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, USA, 2003.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  8. Crick, T. and Sentance, S. 2011. Computing at school: stimulating computing education in the UK. In Proceedings of the 11th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (Koli Calling '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA,122--123. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2094131.2094158 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. CSTA. 2005. Retrieved January 11 2013 from the Association for Computing Machinery: http://www.csta.acm.org/Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  10. Curzon, P., Peckham, J., Taylor, H., Settle, A. and Roberts, E. 2009. Computational thinking (CT): on weaving it in. In Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITiCSE '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 201--202. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1562877.1562941 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  11. Curzon, P., Black, J., Meagher, L.R. and McOwan, P.W. 2009. cs4fn.org: Enthusing students about Computer Science, In Proceedings of Informatics Education Europe IV, Eds. Hermann, C., Lauer, T., Ottman, T. and Welte, M., pp73--80, November.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  12. Cutts, Q., Brown, M.I., Kemp, L. and Matheson, C. 2007. Enthusing and informing potential computer science students and their teachers. In Proceedings of the 12th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITiCSE '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 196--200. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1268784.1268842 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  13. Cutts, Q., Esper, S. and Simon, B. 2011. Computing as the 4th "R": a general education approach to computing education. In Proceedings of the seventh international workshop on Computing education research (ICER '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 133--138. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2016911.2016938 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. Denning, P.J. and McGettrick, A. 2005. Recentering computer science. Commun. ACM 48, 11 (November 2005), 15--19. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1096000.1096018 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  15. Gans, P. 2010. The benefits of using scratch to introduce basic programming concepts in the elementary classroom: poster session. J. Comput. Small Coll. 25, 6 (June 2010), 235--236. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  16. Henriksen, P. and Kölling, M. 2004. Greenfoot: combining object visualisation with interaction. In Companion to the 19th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications (OOPSLA '04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 73--82. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1028664.1028701 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  17. Major, L., Kyriacou, T. and Brereton, P. 2011. Experiences of prospective high school teachers using a programming teaching tool. In Proceedings of the 11th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (Koli Calling '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 126--131. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2094131.2094161 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  18. Malan, D.J. and Leitner, H.H. 2007. Scratch for budding computer scientists. In Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 223--227. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1227310.1227388 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  19. McGettrick, A.D. and Boyle, R. and Ibbett, R. and Lloyd, J. and Lovegrove, G. and Mander, K. 2005. Grand challenges in computing: Education - a summary. Computer Journal, 48 (1). pp. 42--48. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  20. Myketiak, C., Curzon, P., Black, J., McOwan, P. W. and Meagher L. R. 2012. cs4fn: a flexible model for computer science outreach. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITiCSE '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 297--302. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2325296.2325366 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  21. Ouyang, Y., Wolz, U. and Rodger, S.H. 2010. Effective delivery of computing curriculum in middle school: challenges and solutions. In Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 327--328. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1734263.1734375 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  22. Pau, R., Hall, W., and Grace, M. 2011. "It's boring": female students' experience of studying ICT and computing. School Science Review, 92(341): 89--94.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. The Royal Society 2012. Shut down or restart: the way forward for computing in UK schools. London, The Royal Society.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  24. Sentance, S. 2011. Learning from students: issues in computing education for 16--18 year olds. In Proceedings of the 11th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (Koli Calling '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 124--125. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2094131.2094159 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  25. Vahrenhold, J. 2012. On the Importance of Being Earnest: Challenges in Computer Science Education. Invited Keynote at WiPSCE 2012, Hamburg, November. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  26. Wakefield, J. 2012. How schools will boot up a new ICT curriculum. BBC News. Retrieved January 11, 2013, from BBC News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18687248.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  27. Wing, J.M. 2006. A Vision for the 21st Century: Computational Thinking, CACM vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 33--35. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. Making computing interesting to school students: teachers' perspectives

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Login options

      Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

      Sign in
      • Published in

        cover image ACM Conferences
        ITiCSE '13: Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
        July 2013
        384 pages
        ISBN:9781450320788
        DOI:10.1145/2462476

        Copyright © 2013 ACM

        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 ACM 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]

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 1 July 2013

        Permissions

        Request permissions about this article.

        Request Permissions

        Check for updates

        Qualifiers

        • research-article

        Acceptance Rates

        ITiCSE '13 Paper Acceptance Rate51of161submissions,32%Overall Acceptance Rate552of1,613submissions,34%

        Upcoming Conference

        ITiCSE 2024

      PDF Format

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader