Primary and Secondary School Students’ Representation about Computer Sciences and their Job.

Abstract

This paper studies approaches to introduce computer sciences in 19 primary, secondary, public and private schools in Córdoba Province, Argentina. After offering a 13 hours introductory programming course through the development of computer animations, we analyse the main factors related to Computer Science career choice: students’ representations about Computer Scientist job’s demand, students’ beliefs about the disciplinary area of Computer Science, and students’ self-perception of competence using pre and post course survey. Our data show that most schools are teaching their students to “use” the computer and software developed by others, and fewer schools are teaching computational thinking and programming. The computer content knowledge teaching gap is wider when comparing private and public schools. However, after our 13 hours course all of the students changed their representations about Computer Science and its jobs. The amount of students who had positive or negative perceptions do not change after our teaching experience. Nevertheless, the reasons why they perceived themselves as capable or incapable of programming do change. We describe policy implications of these findings.