Female Under-Representation in Computing Education and Industry - A Survey of Issues and Interventions

This survey paper examines the issue of female under-representation in computing education and industry, which has been shown from empirical studies to be a problem for over two decades. While various measures and intervention strategies have been implemented to increase the interest of girls in computing education and industry, the level of success has been discouraging. The primary contribution of this paper is to provide an analysis of the extensive research work in this area. It outlines the progressive decline in female representation in computing education. It also presents the key arguments that attempt to explain the decline and intervention strategies. We conclude that there is a need to further explore strategies that will encourage young female learners to interact more with computer educational games

An Investigation Of Digital Games Features That Appeal To Young Females And Males

This research is part of an attempt to address the well-known problem of female underrepresentation in computer science education and industry. This problem starts between ages 11 to 14 and gets progressively worse in what is often referred to as the “shrinking pipeline effect”. There has been considerable research into the causes of the shrinking pipeline and attempts to halt or reverse it. In spite of this, the causes remain unclear and there is evidence that the problem may be worsening. Digital games are increasingly used in education because of their ability to engage and motivate young learners. Unfortunately, digital games used in the teaching of IT and computer science have been found to appeal less to females than males. This is in spite of the fact that digital games intended for entertainment, as opposed to education, are now very popular with girls. There has been some research into this issue, however more is needed, especially into what game features do and do not appeal to girls at the age that the pipeline starts to shrink. The study reported here aims to identify what characteristics of digital entertainment games appeal to young females and males. The results can be used to guide educators, researchers and game developers and provide criteria for evaluating the suitability of digital educational games for use with specific age groups and genders. We used open card sort with participants aged 11 to 14 to explore their attitude to a range of digital entertainment games. Open card sort allows participants to categorise items in ways that are meaningful to them. There were 32 participants (24 females and 8 males) from four schools in south-east England. They were shown video clips of ten popular games. The participants were then given ten cards, each representing one of the games and asked to sort them into categories based on shared characteristics. This process elicited 131 features (95 from the females and 36 from the males). The data was analysed to identify the features that were a) most significant and b) most appealing to the participants. The findings indicate that there are some gender differences in which game features are perceived as most significant. Some features, such as game action, are significant to the males whereas others, such as game levels, are significant to the females. Interestingly, some features that both genders find significant have different degrees of appeal for example “fun” and “violence”. We are currently using the findings in an experiment with 480 young people. Two digital educational games have been created: one includes features found to appeal to young females and the other includes the opposite or neutral features. The results of this experiment will be used to validate the findings of the initial investigation and form the basis for a framework to facilitate the inclusion of characteristics that appeal to specific groups in educational games and other software

An investigation of digital games features that appeal to young females and males

This research is part of an attempt to address the well-known problem of female underrepresentation in computer science education and industry. This problem starts between ages 11 to 14 and gets progressively worse in what is often referred to as the “shrinking pipeline effect”. There has been considerable research into the causes of the shrinking pipeline and attempts to halt or reverse it. In spite of this, the causes remain unclear and there is evidence that the problem may be worsening. Digital games are increasingly used in education because of their ability to engage and motivate young learners. Unfortunately, digital games used in the teaching of IT and computer science have been found to appeal less to females than males. This is in spite of the fact that digital games intended for entertainment, as opposed to education, are now very popular with girls. There has been some research into this issue, however more is needed, especially into what game features do and do not appeal to girls at the age that the pipeline starts to shrink. The study reported here aims to identify what characteristics of digital entertainment games appeal to young females and males. The results can be used to guide educators, researchers and game developers and provide criteria for evaluating the suitability of digital educational games for use with specific age groups and genders. We used open card sort with participants aged 11 to 14 to explore their attitude to a range of digital entertainment games. Open card sort allows participants to categorise items in ways that are meaningful to them. There were 32 participants (24 females and 8 males) from four schools in south-east England. They were shown video clips of ten popular games. The participants were then given ten cards, each representing one of the games and asked to sort them into categories based on shared characteristics. This process elicited 131 features (95 from the females and 36 from the males). The data was analysed to identify the features that were a) most significant and b) most appealing to the participants. The findings indicate that there are some gender differences in which game features are perceived as most significant. Some features, such as game action, are significant to the males whereas others, such as game levels, are significant to the females. Interestingly, some features that both genders find significant have different degrees of appeal for example “fun” and “violence”. We are currently using the findings in an experiment with 480 young people. Two digital educational games have been created: one includes features found to appeal to young females and the other includes the opposite or neutral features. The results of this experiment will be used to validate the findings of the initial investigation and form the basis for a framework to facilitate the inclusion of characteristics that appeal to specific groups in educational games and other software

Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions

Developing a mobile application to be used in mineral/geological exploration with emphasis on geochemical soil sampling

This paper presents a mobile application that could be used during geological field exploration placing emphasis on Geochemical Soil Sampling technique to capture data. Geological Soil Sampling Field data recorded digitally benefits from quick processing, hence facilitating the mineral exploration task and reducing exploration duration. This paper describes a prototype application developed with NetBeans IDE 6.7/J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.2 emulator platform, which could run on any MIDP compatible devices

COMPACT – An industry originated modeling technique for web development

This paper explores reasons for the low take-up of modeling techniques for web-based applications proposed by academia within industry. We also discuss the key differences between traditional IT development and Web based systems development identifying the issues and current approaches to web development. We argue that industry needs to be central to the future development of web based design methods and solutions in order for these new approaches to work. We then present the COMPACT (Composite Object Modelling Process for Architectural Communication in Teams) model, a technique initially developed by industry for Java based web development which has been further developed and enhanced in conjunction with academia. Its key purpose is to model the high-level system design in order to aid project management and communication between developers of web-based systems who have different skills and knowledge

A design pattern for integration of business process management systems

A cross-domain workflow application may be constructed using a standard reference model such as the one by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) [7] but the requirements for this type of application are inherently different from one organization to another. The existing models and systems built around them meet some but not all the requirements from all the organizations involved in a collaborative process. Furthermore the requirements change over time. This makes the applications difficult to develop and distribute. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based approaches such as the BPET (Business Process Execution Language) intend to provide a solution but fail to address the problems sufficiently, especially in the situations where the expectations and level of skills of the users (e.g. the participants of the processes) in different organisations are likely to be different. In this paper, we discuss a design pattern that provides a novel approach towards a solution. In the solution, business users can design the applications at a high level of abstraction: the use cases and user interactions; the designs are documented and used, together with the data and events captured later that represents the user interactions with the systems, to feed an intermediate component local to the users -the IFM (InterFace Mapper) -which bridges the gaps between the users and the systems. We discuss the main issues faced in the design and prototyping. The approach alleviates the need for re-programming with the APIs to any back-end service thus easing the development and distribution of the application

Towards the design of a portal framework for web services integration

Web services based systems have recently found their way into many applications such as e-commerce, corporate integration and e-learning. Construction of new services or introducing new functions to existing services requires composition of web services. Current approaches to service composition often require major programming effort; this is time consuming and requires considerable developer expertise. In this paper, we explore the real and rich scenarios found in e-learning where education services are offered through the Internet by networked universities to potentially millions in the world. These services are derived from existing/emerging business operation processes and commonly offered through a web interface, combined with other services such as email and ftp services, to support partial/full business processes. We identify the requirements for a generic portal framework for easy integration of existing expertise and services of individual institutions (enterprises). We examine the existing technologies and standards, and point out the gaps to be filled in designing the architecture of the framewor

A Generic Framework for Describing Study Plans for Networked Universities using Meta-Data

This paper presents a generic framework that can be used to describe study plans using meta-data. The context of this research and associated technologies and standards is presented. The approach adopted here has been developed within the mENU project that aims to provide a model for a European Networked University. The methodology for the design of the generic Framework is discussed and the main design requirements are presented. The approach adopted was based on a set of templates containing meta-data required for the description of programs of study and consisting of generic building elements annotated appropriately. The process followed to develop the templates is presented together with a set of evaluation criteria to test the suitability of the approach. The templates structure is presented and example templates are shown. A first evaluation of the approach has shown that the proposed framework can provide a flexible and competent means for the generic description of study plans for the purposes of a networked university