This paper presents lessons learned from five years of teaching a five-day game design and programming outreach course. The course was offered in summer time and targeted at middle and high school students. In total, 462 youngsters have taken part in 21 course instances. We describe our course concept, and discuss our successes and challenges. In particular, we focus on understanding our student populations by presenting descriptives and statistics of the events, and performing a statistical cluster analysis based on pre- and post-surveys. The cluster analysis was complemented with an analysis of the qualitative data, also originating from the surveys. Taken together, students could be classified into five groups with substantial differences: Enthusiasts, Newbies, Uncertains, Experimenters, and Unsatisfieds. Awareness of the clusters helps instructors of similar courses in developing course content, designing differentiated instruction, and planning follow-up or advanced courses.
%0 Book Section
%1 LakEtAl14b
%A Lakanen, Antti-Jussi
%A Isomöttönen, Ville
%A Lappalainen, Vesa
%B Proceedings of the 45th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
%C New York, NY
%D 2014
%I ACM
%K k12 myown
%P 647--652
%R 10.1145/2538862.2538914
%T Five Years of Game Programming Outreach: Understanding Student Differences
%U http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2538862.2538914
%X This paper presents lessons learned from five years of teaching a five-day game design and programming outreach course. The course was offered in summer time and targeted at middle and high school students. In total, 462 youngsters have taken part in 21 course instances. We describe our course concept, and discuss our successes and challenges. In particular, we focus on understanding our student populations by presenting descriptives and statistics of the events, and performing a statistical cluster analysis based on pre- and post-surveys. The cluster analysis was complemented with an analysis of the qualitative data, also originating from the surveys. Taken together, students could be classified into five groups with substantial differences: Enthusiasts, Newbies, Uncertains, Experimenters, and Unsatisfieds. Awareness of the clusters helps instructors of similar courses in developing course content, designing differentiated instruction, and planning follow-up or advanced courses.
%@ 978-1-4503-2605-6
@incollection{LakEtAl14b,
abstract = {This paper presents lessons learned from five years of teaching a five-day game design and programming outreach course. The course was offered in summer time and targeted at middle and high school students. In total, 462 youngsters have taken part in 21 course instances. We describe our course concept, and discuss our successes and challenges. In particular, we focus on understanding our student populations by presenting descriptives and statistics of the events, and performing a statistical cluster analysis based on pre- and post-surveys. The cluster analysis was complemented with an analysis of the qualitative data, also originating from the surveys. Taken together, students could be classified into five groups with substantial differences: Enthusiasts, Newbies, Uncertains, Experimenters, and Unsatisfieds. Awareness of the clusters helps instructors of similar courses in developing course content, designing differentiated instruction, and planning follow-up or advanced courses.},
acmid = {2538914},
added-at = {2014-08-06T10:57:05.000+0200},
address = {New York, NY},
author = {Lakanen, Antti-Jussi and Isom\"{o}tt\"{o}nen, Ville and Lappalainen, Vesa},
biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2d4866953a24e011dba6f2c6fb2acdd70/wiljami74},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 45th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education},
description = {Five years of game programming outreach},
doi = {10.1145/2538862.2538914},
interhash = {4183cbcfc34da579c137b8f72cbee612},
intrahash = {d4866953a24e011dba6f2c6fb2acdd70},
isbn = {978-1-4503-2605-6},
keywords = {k12 myown},
location = {Atlanta, Georgia, USA},
numpages = {6},
pages = {647--652},
publisher = {ACM},
series = {SIGCSE '14},
timestamp = {2016-01-11T11:43:26.000+0100},
title = {Five Years of Game Programming Outreach: Understanding Student Differences},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2538862.2538914},
year = 2014
}