

Scalable Game Design Initiative - Programming Goes Back to School - YAFZ
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/5/148567-programming-goes-back-to-school/fulltext

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YAFZ
The "Pedagogy" section is superb: "Systematically investigate the interaction
of pedagogical approaches and motivational levels so that teachers can broaden
participation. With school sites in Alaska, California, Georgia, Ohio, South
Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming and over 10,000 student-created games and
simulations, we were able to explore a uniquely rich set of motivational and
educational data.6 We found the main common factor supporting motivational
levels and skills across different school contexts, gender, and ethnicity was
scaffolding. Of all the factors we considered, scaffolding was the only
significant one. Scaffolding, a pedagogical aspect indicating the degree and
kind of support provided by a teacher, was assessed through classroom
observation. Direct instruction, which provides a very high degree of
scaffolding, highly polarized motivational levels between boys and girls. With
direct instruction a teacher provides step-by-step instructions at a detailed
level (for example, "click this button," "paint the frog green"). Direct
instruction is particularly unappealing to girls. With less scaffolding, such
as with guided discovery, a teacher employs a more inquiry-based approach that
includes classroom discussion (such as "what should we do?" and "how can we do
this?"). In guided discovery, the motivational levels of girls not only
approached the motivational levels of boys but often exceeded it. In a number
of classes, using guided discovery raised the motivational levels of girls to
100%. This is exciting because it suggests that broadening participation is
not a question of difficult-to-change factors such as school affluence.
Preconceived notions such as lower interest of girls in programming turned out
to be unsubstantiated. Even in cases where most literature would suggest a
gender effect, for instance if there were significantly fewer girls in a
class, we found that the right level of scaffolding could raise the level of
motivation in girls to be even higher than that of boys."

