Lakanen, A. J., Isomöttönen, V., & Lappalainen, V. (2012). Life two years after a game programming course: longitudinal viewpoints on K-12 outreach. In Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education (pp. 481-486). New York: ACM.

Summary

Type: Empirical

Purpose: The authors ran "week-long K-12 game programming courses for three summers... [They] investigate what programming-related activities students do after they take a course, and what factors in the students’ background relate to post-course programming. [They] also investigate a possible change in the students’ interest towards higher education science studies" (p. 481).

Findings: "We find that most students continue programming after the course and that their interest towards science studies keeps increasing. In student background we observed some indicative trends, but did not find reliable explaining factors related to post-course programming or increased interest towards science studies" (p. 481).

Recommendations: "In the surveys of this study we did not specify the exact meaning of the word programming to the students. Therefore, we do not have detailed information about what type of programming the students had done. A matter of further study is what kind of programming exercises students do after a course, e.g., games, web programming, or some other types of programs. This information could yield a better understanding of the relationship between the students’ post-course activities and background factors" (p. 485).


Methodology

Sample Size: 233

Participant Type: Students

Notes: K-12 students, ages 12-16, participated in 11 courses. "These five-day events consisted of lectures and teaching basic programming skills (8 hours), game design (3 hours), game development using Jypeli programming library2 and C# language (12 hours), and showcasing (2 hours)" (p. 482).