ICER 2023

On this page, you will find information about our ICER 2023 paper 'Children's Interest in a CS Career: Exploring Age, Gender, Computer Interests, Programming Experience and Stereotypes'. You can find the full research paper in the ACM Digital Library (open access).

Which children want to work in Computer Science (CS)? That is the question that we focus on in our research. We are motivated to do this research since we believe it can help increase gender diversity in CS. Increasing diversity benefits the economy, gender equality and our society. However, several obstacles prevent women from entering the field. Although these barriers develop from an early age, research focused on children is limited. Furthermore, limited work is done within European countries. Therefore, we collected data from 200 children between the age of 7 and 14 who were visiting the NEMO science museum in Amsterdam. We looked at how the interests in a CS career in these children differ based on their age, gender, computer interests, programming experience, and stereotypical beliefs. Overall, these children are not interested in becoming a programmer. We did find higher interest in a CS career in boys, children who like computer and video gaming, children who gained programming experience and especially those who did so in informal settings and children that believe that programmers are social. To increase the participation of women in CS, we suggest motivating girls more to engage in computer and programming-related activities - especially out-of-school activities - while ensuring that these activities are gender inclusive. With our study, as well as suggested future work, we hope to contribute to understanding why children are or are not interested in a CS career and to increasing gender diversity in CS.

This page serves as an additive to our ICER 2023 paper. You can find the anonymized dataset, materials, and R-scripts. If you have any questions or if you want to talk about our study, feel free to contact me.