Introducing Computer Science to Brazilian Girls in Elementary School Through HCI Concepts

The necessity of a larger representation of women in Information Technology (IT) is a worldwide issue. The participation of women, where computing is involved, both in academia and in the job market has been much discussed. The IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) [11] is dedicated to promoting women scientists and engineers, facilitating the recruitment and retention of women in technical disciplines globally.

The Brazilian Computer Society (SBC) has held, in the last years, the WIT (Women in Information Technology) [12], a workshop to discuss subjects related to gender and IT and supports various project initiatives to attract women to Computing. The Project Meninas Digitais (Digital Girls) [7] was created from discussions in the WIT, which the main objective is to promote Computing and technology for girls from ten to sixteen at the end of elementary school or middle school, in order to generate interest in the area and motivate them to choose Computer Science (CS) as a career. Several activities are being carried out by various collaborators throughout Brazil such as lectures, technical visits and other initiatives.

In the end of 2013 the Brazilian Government through the National Council of Technological and Scientific Development (CNPq) launched the call for project proposals that would encourage the participation of girls in science, computing and engineering. Several projects were approved all over the country [2, 5]. Many of them have the objective to conducted activities to stimulate teenage girls to choose Computing as a career.

Emíli@s – Armação em Bits ¹ is one of these projects approved. Differently of most of the projects to motivate girls to choose Computing as a career, Emíli@s also includes Database and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) activities to demonstrate that Computing is more than only programming. The project has the involvement of Computer Science university teachers, a female Information System student, student girls and a female teacher from a public school in Curitiba in Paraná State (in the South of Brazil). The involvement with a public school is one of the requisites of the CNPq call.

This involvement is in line with one of the actions suggested by Medeiros (2005) [9] - one of the precursors of this discussion in Brazil - that may be considered to allow Brazilian women to become full citizens of the information society: to provide the basis for adequate training of girls and teachers - One necessary direction requires rethinking the educational structure, and developing new kinds of content to be used in courses. These changes must start at an early stage.

This paper presents the HCI activity performed in the context of Emíli@s and Compute você mesm@ ² project. The results of the activity performed in a small city of Paraná State were also presented. It is important to mention that the results are qualitative in nature and provide insights about HCI activities to elementary school student girls. Some similar initiatives are presented in the next section. The experiments’ protocol is detailed explained in Sect. 3. In Sect. 4 the results of the experiments are shown. And finally, some considerations are made.

In general girls perceive computing careers to be boring, solitary, and lacking real-world context as demonstrated by Yardi and Bruckman [13]. However, some researches have shown that HCI can positively impact interest in Computer Science courses. Yardi et al. [13, 14] gave a six-week HCI course to ten American students ages 11–13 and found that practicing HCI increased their interest in taking future computer related courses.

Margolis and Fisher [8] show that HCI has some promise in serving as a gateway to computing for females. Their work describes the Carnegie Mellon initiative that implemented curricular changes including an emphasis on HCI. The results demonstrate that the retention rates amongst women have increased.

Robinson and Pérez-Quiñones [10] conducted a weeklong HCI workshop with underrepresented middle school girls. The workshop was focused on an activity where girls created a paper prototype for a chat application. The results reveal that paper prototyping can be used as a motivator for a career path in computer science.

Maciel, Bim and Boscarioli [1, 6] also conducted an HCI activity with Brazilian girls following the Computer Science Unplugged (CSU) instructions to practice design concepts. The experience was a pilot experiment for the experiments presented in this paper. The results demonstrate the girls’ high level involvement in the tasks proposed, showing that HCI is an attractive discipline.

As HCI is interdisciplinary in nature which gives the opportunity to explore the relationship between CS and other disciplines that may interest women. Besides this, HCI, as its name explicitly stated is concerned with human. It worries about the well-being of different users’ profiles while interacting with diverse computational devices. Consequently, the stereotype of “nerd” disappears when practicing HCI.

Additionally, communication abilities are clearly needed to develop a computational application concerned with HCI approaches. Therefore, women could comprehend that Computer Science also involves the direct contact with people, which could attract them to the area.

The first activity was consisted in make the reception of the girls to explain the objectives of the experiments, and to organize groups to initiate activities. Secondly, a pre-survey was made with the application of a questionnaire with questions about the use (purpose and frequency) of computational devices, the girls’ perception about Computer Science courses and their career intention. The results of this survey are presented in the Subsects. 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3.

The third activity consisted in five tasks, proposed by the Computer Science Unplugged Project [3] about HCI Design without Computer [4]. Each task (detailed explained in the following subsection) was presented separately to the student girls who had some minutes to develop their solutions.

The third and fourth experiments had an extra activity, which consisted in a pos-survey. This questionnaire consisted of seven questions such as, “What do you think of the activity? The activity met yours expectations? You ever imagine computing activities could be made without the PC?”. The goal of the post-survey was to assess the satisfaction of the students in participating in the proposed activity. The necessity of this fourth activity was identified after the first experiments.

Participants’ Profiles. The four experiments were conducted with teenage girls, from twelve to seventeen, from public schools. All of the girls have computers at home and use them daily. The activities performed using the computer mainly concern communication.

In Exp1, three of them mentioned using the computer to do their school homework. And only one mentioned playing games as one of the purpose to use the computer. The time spent on the Internet varies from two to fifteen hours a day (seven hours in average). Concerning the computational devices they used, only one does not use a smartphone. All of them but one use a personal computer. Three of them also use tablets and finally four of them have experiences with notebooks.

In Exp2, five participants referred to having a computer at home, and all use it at school. Reasons for use are social networking, gaming, school assignment research, and chatting with classmates.

Concerning the use of technology and Internet access, both in Exp3 and Exp4, all mentioned using the computer to do their school homework and to have Internet access. Two in Exp3 and three in Exp4 quoted the use of computing devices for playing games.

In the Exp4, 13 students reported having family and/or friends working in the computing area and cited the reasons why they would take a workshop in the field: “a job demand, curriculum enrichment, and the lack of professionals in the area.” In Exp3, all of them reported that they use the computer and Internet daily. The reasons for participating in a computer workshop are the same shown in Exp4.

In Exp2, nine participants claimed to know nothing about courses in the field of computing and only one said, quite generically, that she knew “almost nothing, and I never really looked more into it”.

Three students, in Exp3, considered that a computer science course has content about: computer assembly, creating websites and program installation. In addition, other four described the profile of a computer science student as “nerd-like” and “a very intelligent person, studious and good logical thinking.” The rest of them did not know what to say. In Exp4, half of them indicated that CS involves activities such as website development and hardware. The other half could not explain.

It is interesting to see that most of them are not sure about their choices nor know them completely. For example, the girl who wants to be a PhD in French Language indicates this option because she considers French a beautiful language and because she would like to live in France. Only one of them indicated that search for information to choose on future profession. The girl who wants to be a petrochemical engineer said she had researched the area in several websites because, in her own words, “I always watch news which says this field will grow.” A participant said she wanted to be a P.E. teacher because she likes sports. Two of them revealed the intention of being the officer in charge at a police station due to influence by a successful TV soap opera, which shows the profession to be related to the fight against crime.

4.5 Task 5

In the first experiment (Exp1) three groups of tags were distributed: Wrap it, Ingredients and Dimensions, as shown in Fig. 1:

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The pair that drew the Wrap it tags made very detailed pictures. However, the two other pairs that had to “discovered” the meanings of the draws didn’t completely get the right meaning. They gave different meanings for wrap with foil and stop conveyer belt (unwrap and put in the conveyer belt, respectively).

The pair that drew the Ingredients tags also made detailed pictures. But the other pairs gave different meanings for sugar and extra sugar: granulated (for sugar) and sugar and extra coconut (for extra sugar).

The E1P2 drew the Dimensions tags. The other pairs have difficulties only with the set bar size draw, one answered decreasing sizes and the other pair gave no answer.

In the second experiment (E2) Task 5 had to be explained twice. Concept understood, the girls started discussing the representation icons. Tags were provided for the groups (Fig. 2), where design solutions were to be drawn as icons.

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E2G1 received the Wrap tag. The girls moved on to draw the corresponding wrapping material. They used dark grey to indicate aluminum, and shaped a heart to indicate paper, and so on. E2G2 was in charge of adding ingredients. Their concern was to draw cocoa on the tins, a cow to represent milk, sugar cane for sugar, and so on. E2G3 received the Try Me tag. They used the drawing of a tongue to illustrate “try me”. They also used different facial expressions. For “Eww – bake chocolate again”, they made a spoon inside a mixing bowl, and for “Eww, eww – throw away”, they drew a trash can. Perhaps more time would have been necessary for this task, if better solutions were to be sought.

Each pair in Exp3 and Exp4 also got a set of tags. Thus they created individual icons to represent such buttons. Later there was the exchange of solutions, in pairs, to socialize the answers. The E3P2 created an icon that detail is the action “put into box” with a draw of a box ready to be filled. The label “Ingredients: Add milk” was well designed by E3P4 pair, who proposed the design of a milk box with the illustration of a cow.

In Exp4, in addition to tags already mentioned, the students used the “Making” tag with the following icons: star mixing, stop mixing, start heating, stop heating, pour into molds, stamp a pattern. The pair E4P5, developed an icon for “star mixing” and “stop mixing” representing the hand in both situations.

Note that the use of HCI strategies with girls helps fighting the idea that computer is a hard science in essence. As it is seen nowadays, a sociotechnical approach to systems is on the rise, so that it is recommended to build diverse teams in terms of gender, for example. However, we still need actions as presented in this paper to demystify computing for girls. In the proposed tasks it was observed that the girls were able to meet the necessary requirements for the development of all tasks.

They also understood the importance of adopting different artifacts and managed to evaluate the concept of affordance when they analyzed the doors of Task 1, as it was reported in all the experiments; they understood the importance of knowing the users, understanding their expectations and needs in the course of all tasks, mainly in Task 2, as shown by the discussions in Exp2; in Task 3 they were able to work out concepts of “transfer effect” and “population stereotypes” to treat the signs and issues that required users’ prior knowledge, according to the resolution by pair E4P5; Task 4 explored the concept of “visible constraints” for the design of the proposed cupboard; finally, Task 5 explored icons and the importance of representations and meanings; in all the experiments they were clearly understood.

As to Programa Nacional Meninas Digitais (Digital Girls National Programme), volunteers are working on a website that will concentrate information about various enterprises spread throughout Brazil, thus helping to disclose the issue and attract interest. The group communicates through an email list, which grows every year with the inclusion of the Forum participants and via Facebook social network⁴.

As future works, we can mention the development of new activities, involving HCl and girls. Although the proposed CSU is relevant, we must develop new practices so that these girls are involved continuously other concepts of HCI are discussed.