Maria Knobelsdorf, University of Dortmund, Germany - Didaktik der ...

Altogether 830 participants visited the InfoSphere since its first
workshops in January 2011. Figure 2 displays the distribution of
the 41 workshops to the different topics.
Figure 2. Overview over the number of workshops
After development and pretests the actual evaluation phase began
in January 2012. Since then 325 school students registered for an
InfoSphere workshop. Naturally some students take part in more
than one course, so the number of different students who visit the
InfoSphere is a bit lower. For our evaluation our sample consists
of N = 215 school students (301 valid pretests, 265 valid
posttests, 215 valid matches). In addition to this online-evaluation
we also ask primary school students for their opinion but they do
not have to fill out the extensive questionnaires. Therefore they
are not part of the presented evaluation.
More precisely in the first questionnaire we have evaluated the
personal background of the participants, their conception of CS,
their own interests, their performance at school, what they think
about computer scientists and their expectations for the workshop.
Afterwards we ask them the same questions about their
conception of CS and what they think about becoming a computer
scientist. In addition we want to hear their opinion about the
workshop itself.
Figure 3 displays the distribution of the participants by age and
gender. In contrast to the proportion of women in CS courses at
the RWTH Aachen University of 10.7 % (215 out of 2016
students) [17] the proportion of female students in our workshops
is relatively high with 33.5 % females (101 out of 301
participants). Students between 12 and 17 years form our main
target group. The group in the age of 12 to 14 has the chance to
select CS as their second elective at school. The older ones have
to choose their courses in the final two years in school (senior
classes – Oberstufe), select their advanced courses
(Leistungskurse), and make up their mind what to study at
university or during apprenticeship. For both groups it is very
important to be informed what CS really mean, to make a wellconsidered
decision.
We try to reach all types of schools, but as we have mostly contact
to grammar school teachers 80.3 % of our participants attend this
type of school. In addition we try to reach students who have not
been registered in a CS course so far. Up to now 17.8 % of the
participants belong to this group. For this group it is interesting to
analyze which workshops they are especially interested in and if
these workshops help them to decide, whether CS could be a right
topic to choose as an elective.
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Figure 3. Distribution of the participants by age and gender
We try to provide good access to CS topics for all different kind
of school students. To evaluate what are their motives we ask the
participants for their personal interests in computers and other
technologies, discovering backgrounds, learning in groups and
presenting their results. Figure 4 shows that most of the
participants like working with a computer, develop programs on
their own and get to know novel technologies best.
Figure 4. School students' interests concerning CS (mean on a
scale from 1 to 6)
One specific goal of InfoSphere is to have participants develop a
more realistic concept of the field of CS and at least consider if it
would be the right choice to become an computer scientist.
Therefore we evaluate how much the students think they know
about being a computer scientist. Figure 5 gives an overview over
the results before and after the workshop. Both bar charts show a
peak at number 6, which means that most of the students think
they know quite much about being a computer scientist. The
bigger changes are at number 3 & 4 and number 9 & 10. This
shows that after the workshop more school students think that