How to Catch'em All: Designing Attractive Learning Activities for Girls in Computer Science: A Systematic Framework

Abstract

To fight the underrepresentation of female students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), schools and universities should cooperate in communicating what skills and competencies are required and to what extent schools already help develop them. Universities need to communicate the necessary competencies and schools should encourage girls by an appropriate design of learning activities, exercises, and projects. They also need to emphasize the underlying competencies and how this will help in taking up STEM subjects at university, thereby raising the girls’ self-esteem and self-efficacy. The key to transporting this message is an appropriate and systematic learning activity design based on a competency-based approach and appropriate teaching methods as well as a more female-responsive scope of tasks. This paper focuses on computer science and sets up a morphological analysis of dimensions to consider when designing learning activities for computer science lessons, taking into account what kind of subjects girls are interested in and what fosters their skills and their self-efficacy in STEM.