TOUCH:: TELL: IT TENDENCIES AND CONSEQUENCES FOR THE USAGE OF EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

This paper describes some tendencies in internet and computer use of children focusing on the differences between male and female teens and the results of our survey which are compared to international research results. The tendencies are extracted from the figures of a survey conducted as part of the project touch:: tell:: IT, which lasts until 2011 and is a research-project aimed at the improvement of motivation and self-esteem of young female students. In the long run the researched measures shall be introduced in Austrian schools to increase the number of female enrollments at technical universities. Like many technically oriented degree programs in Austria the degree program Information Management has had and has problems to motivate females to take up technical studies. Therefore a research program was introduced to find ways to help girls to start learning programming with new approaches. After implementing several measures at the degree program Information Management like changes in the curriculum, the program's advertising strategy and also in the didactic approaches we are now evaluating new ways to introduce software development as early as in the 2nd or 3rd grade in high school (13 years) with an explicitly constructionist didactic approach. This paper describes the approach and the methods of these measures. 11 courses with children aged between 13 to 17 years are held in summer 2010 and will be evaluated until fall 2010. The preparation courses are already finished and together with the pre-test questionnaire of the current courses some interesting tendencies can be seen. In the first part of the paper the problem and the known approaches for improving the motivation of female students for learning a programming language are described and compared. Furthermore the different didactic approaches are shown and discussed focusing on the constructionist approach which will be described in detail. Then the Project touch:: tell:: IT is introduced and the general requirements for the realization of the above mentioned courses are described. Touch:: tell:: IT researches the introduction and use of EPLs (Educational Programming Languages) like Scratch, StarLogo, Alice, and many more. The results of the pre-tests and pre-test questionnaires will be described and compared with international research. Also the consequences for the continuing courses are discussed.