Summer Camps in Georgia: Roll-up Report and Invitation to Play with Data (SECOND TRY)

I had posted this blog piece back in January, but then was asked to take it down.  There were concerns that the data were not anonymized enough to guarantee participant anonymity.  Tom McKlin did a great job of working with the Human Subjects Review board here at Georgia Tech, to figure out a set of data that would be useful to other computing education researchers, but would guarantee participant anonymity (to the extent feasible).  Here’s our newly approved data set.

Our external evaluators (The Findings Group) has just produced the roll-up analysis for all the GaComputes related summer camps from Summer 2012. These include camps offered at Georgia Tech, and those offere elsewhere in the state, started by GaComputes seed grants (as described in the 2011 SIGCSE paper that I blogged about). The results are strong:

• Over 1,000 K-12 students participated statewide.
• The camps were even more effective with women than men.
• There was a statistically significant improvement in content knowledge for Scratch, Alice, and App Inventor, across genders, ethnic groups, and grade levels.
• “The computing camps were particularly effective at increasing students’ intent to pursue additional computing, self‐efficacy in doing computing, and sense of belonging in computing.”
• “Minority students reported significantly more growth in their intent to persist in computing than majority students.”

The Findings Group had a particularly interesting proposal for the Computing Education Research community. They are making all the survey data from all the camps freely available, in an anonymous form. They have a sense that there is more to learn from these data. It’s a lot of students, and there’s a lot to explore there in terms of motivation, engagement, and learning.

If you play with these data, do let us know what you learn!