Computing Courses for School Students

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What is the Action?

Provide school students with short-term computing courses which can run alongside talks and events with industry professionals. The goal is to expose students to new mathematical and programming skills, to give them some insights into academic environment and career opportunities, introduce students to relevant role models, and to demonstrate how computing could be applied in a real-life scenario by letting students work on projects that imitate real world problems.

Quick Facts to Support this Action

A week-long computing workshops for girls in Ireland resulted in a significant increase of intentions to study computer science on third level.

Ways to Implement this Action

There are several ways in which short computing courses can be provided to school students.

Some ideas (extracts from case studies) are summarised below:

➤ Coding camps/workshops for transition year students

Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin), Dublin City University (DCU) and Trinity College Dublin (TCD) practice weekly-long camps/workshops for transition year students (typically aged 15-17 who decide to take a year before finishing school to focus on their professional development). Programme for the camp includes development of web applications, game development, programming robots, python sessions led by existing students of the faculty and more. DCU reported that their summer camps have achieved a 50% female participation.

➤ Female only programming workshops and events

Trinity College Dublin runs the CodePlus initiative for transition year school girls. Technical workshops to expose girls to the world of computing take place, alongside with talks and career presentations lead by industry role models. Read more on CodePlus here.
TU Dublin offers a one-day event Coding4Girls that invites female secondary school students to a day with practical projects, sessions with exisiting university students, and an opportunity to network and get inspired to pursue a degree in computer science. At the end of the day prizes are awarded to high-performing students in this event.

➤ Interdisciplinary Online Courses

School children aged 10-15 are offered (through their teachers, who are reached via different channels including social media) to take part in an online interdisciplinary data science course provided by RockStartIt project of The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The course deals with the decline of the bee population and can span over several weeks with each session being from 30 mins to 2.5 hours in duration. The information and course materials are free and available exclusively online and no specific guidance for the teachers is required. The project is particularly targeting single gender classes with girls and has an aim to spark interest in computer science among their participants. This and other interdisciplinary online courses from RockStartiT are findable here.

Evaluation Approach

While it might be challenging to assess a short-term impact of this action, a way to see impact is for instance, to administer student survey before and after the initiative.

Study “CodePlus”—Measuring Short-Term Efficacy in a Non-Formal, All-Female CS Outreach Programme assessed computing self-efficacy, and compared interntions to study CS, perceptions of IT professions, and perception of undergraduate CS course before and after the initiative.

Study Engaging Girls in Computer Science: Do Single-Gender Interdisciplinary Classes Help?  assessed the enthusiasm potential of an intervention, using three components: positive feelings, interest, and future intents in the pre- and post-questionnaire. Sample questions from the survey is available in the Resources section.

Bee Project – Teacher’s guide –  RockStartIT https://rockstartit.com/kursuebersicht-bienenprojekt/

ComputeTY 2025 – DCU – Faculty of Engineering and Computing – Dublin City University https://www.dcu.ie/engineeringandcomputing/news/2025/may/computety-2025

ICT Summer Camp – City Campus 2024 – Computer Science – Technological University Dublin https://www.tudublin.ie/explore/faculties-and-schools/computing-digital-data/school-of-computer-science/news–events/ict-summer-camp—city-campus-2024.php#:~:text=The%20Computing%20Academy%20takes%20place,pm%20Friday%2C%2012th%20April%202024.

Lawlor, G., Byrne, P. and Tangney, B., 2020. “CodePlus”—Measuring Short-Term Efficacy in a Non-Formal, All-Female CS Outreach Programme. ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), 20(4), pp.1-18.

Marquardt, K., Wagner, I. and Happe, L., 2023, May. Engaging girls in computer science: Do single-gender interdisciplinary classes help?. In 2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET) (pp. 128-140). IEEE.

RockStartIT – Project of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology – https://rockstartit.com/

TY Workshops / CodePlus – Information for Prospective Undergraduate Students – School of Computer Science and Statistics – Trinity College Dublin https://www.tcd.ie/scss/second-level-students/#tab_1861911

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Survey for to assess the enthusiasm potential of online interdisciplinary courses for school students

Study Engaging Girls in Computer Science: Do Single-Gender Interdisciplinary Classes Help?

Sample survey items (with Likert-type scale) assessing enthusiasm potential based on components such as positive feelings, interest, future intents, and perception:

  • I enjoy solving problems with computers (positive feelings)
  • Computing jobs are boring (interest)
  • I do not want to deal with coding in my life (future intents)
  • I know I can do well in CS (perception)

Find the full list of items in the study here.