The Potential of Humanitarian Applications to Increase Interest and Motivation of Underrepresented Student Groups
Pages 1780 - 1781
Abstract
This study investigated whether humanitarian applications of computing are more interesting and motivating to students than non-humanitarian options and whether there are differences across race/ethnic groups. A survey was developed to measure students' interest by asking them to choose between two applications, one humanitarian and one non-humanitarian. Students were also asked to rate how motivating they would find working on a collection of humanitarian and non-humanitarian applications.
376 introductory computing students at four institutions completed the survey and 340 student responses were analyzed based upon their self-reported races/ethnicities. Students in all race/ethnic groups were more interested in and motivated by humanitarian applications over non-humanitarian options. Black, Latinx and White students chose humanitarian applications more often than Asian students, indicating a higher level of interest in computing for social good. All four groups rated humanitarian applications statistically higher than non-humanitarian at the p<.001 level.
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Heidi J. C. Ellis, Gregory W. Hislop, and Lori Postner. 2021. The Power of Open Source for Social Good to Increase Diversity in Computing. In Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (Virtual Event, USA) (SIGCSE '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1305. https://doi.org/10.1145/3408877.3439628
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Michael Goldweber. 2018. Strategies for Adopting CSG-Ed In CS 1. In 2018 Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT). 1--2. https://doi.org/10.1109/RESPECT.2018.8491703
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Lori Postner, Gregory W Hislop, and Heidi J.C. Ellis. 2023. Humanitarian Applications Increase Interest and Motivation of Women in Computing. In Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (Toronto ON, Canada) (SIGCSE 2023). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 416--422. https://doi.org/10.1145/3545945.3569832
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Index Terms
- The Potential of Humanitarian Applications to Increase Interest and Motivation of Underrepresented Student Groups
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March 2024
2007 pages
ISBN:9798400704246
DOI:10.1145/3626253
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Published: 15 March 2024
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