The Effect of CS Unplugged on Middle-School Students’ Views of CS Rivka Taub Mordechai Ben-Ari Michal Armoni Department of Science Teaching Weizmann Institute of Science Rehovot 76100 Israel {rivka.taub,moti.ben-ari,michal.armoni}@weizmann.ac.il ABSTRACT Many students hold incorrect views of what computer science (CS) is, and they have negative attitudes towards the field. In order to address these difficulties, a series of learning activities called Computer Science Unplugged was developed by Bell et al. [3]. These activities expose young people to central concepts in CS in an entertaining way, without requiring a computer. Using questionnaires and interviews, we examined the effect of the activities on middle-school students' views of CS, specifically, on their views of: (a) the nature of CS; (b) the characteristics of computer scientists and work in CS; (c) the variety of employment in CS. The results indicate that—although the students generally understood what CS is—they perceived the computer as the essence of CS and not primarily as a tool, contrary to the intention of the CS Unplugged activities. We suggest additions to the activities intended to increase the change in the views of CS that students have. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Information Science Education – computer science education General Terms Human Factors Keywords Computer Science Unplugged, attitudes, views, K-12 instruction 1. INTRODUCTION During recent years there has been a decline in the number of high-school and college students choosing to study computer science (CS) [6, 9]. Some of the reasons are the students' negative attitudes and views about the field; it is perceived as boring and tedious, requiring workers to spend many hours in front of the computer. In order to address these difficulties, a set of 20 activities called Computer Science Unplugged was developed by Tim Bell and his colleagues at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand [3]. These activities are intended to expose young people and students (from elementary school through college) to central concepts in computer science in an entertaining and challenging way, without requiring a computer. CS Unplugged contains activities on different topics, such as how computers store information (the binary system and the representation of pictures as pixels), and algorithms (searching and sorting). Other interesting topics include cryptography and networks. The CS Unplugged activities demonstrate the above topics using teamwork, games, tricks, and other entertaining methods that require only the simplest equipment, primarily worksheets. The goals of CS Unplugged are [Bell, personal communication]: • Increase students’ interest in CS; • Students will perceive CS as more challenging, intellectually stimulating, and cooperative than they did before; • Students will better understand what CS is and avoid confusing it with programming; • Promote CS as a career for women. In this paper we report on a research project that examined the effect of the participation in the CS Unplugged activities on students' views of CS. Section 2 contains definitions of the terminology used in the paper, followed by a literature review on views of CS. The research methodology is described in Section 3 and the results in Section 4. Section 5 discusses the results and Section 6 contains our conclusions. 2. BACKGROUND 2.1 Terminology Different researchers use different terms for the concepts attitudes and views. Some use beliefs, some perceptions and some views. To make a clear distinction between attitudes and views, we define the terminology that will be used in this article. Following Ajzen [1], we define attitudes as representing evaluations towards an “attitude object,” in dimensions such as good-bad, harmful- beneficial, pleasant-unpleasant and likable-dislikable. Views are how students perceive something like CS, regardless of their evaluations of these perceptions. 2.2 Students' views and attitudes of CS Cassel et al. [6] argue that the crisis in enrollments in CS does not stem from a single cause, but rather from many factors. They report on negative views about the nature and attractiveness of work in CS, doubts about the relevance of CS, and the low level of public understanding of the broader dimensions of CS. They Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. ITiCSE’09, July 6–9, 2009, Paris, France. Copyright 2009 ACM 978-1-60558-381-5/09/07...$5.00. 99