codeFair - Leveling the Playing Field in Coding Education

The codeFair research project is developing and testing a new approach to coding education. The project focuses on beginners in coding, who often feel overwhelmed, particularly in diverse groups. The goals are to significantly increase the effectiveness of instruction, thereby improving learners’ perceived competence and boosting their motivation.

Motivation

Coding education often emphasizes learners’ exploratory problem-solving. However, this constructivist approach relies on prior knowledge, which frequently overwhelms learners with little or no prior experience, particularly during the early stages of their studies. Furthermore, the prerequisites among students in a cohort are often highly heterogeneous. Factors such as social inequality and differing socialization contribute to this, as does the academic culture in computer science. Depending on gender, this has varying effects on students’ behavior and mindset. Such unequal backgrounds of experience then also have negative consequences for self-efficacy expectations regarding academic success—an issue that appears to affect students who identify as female even more strongly.

Approach and Objectives

The codeFair project is developing and researching a new teaching approach through a participatory and iterative process, one based on targeted guidance, the teaching of strategies, and deliberate practice and progress monitoring. This approach draws on proven teaching and learning formats from other disciplines and learning contexts. This creates learning situations in which all learners experience a cognitive load that is subjectively manageable. Negative effects stemming from varying prior experiences and other diversity characteristics are thus mitigated and balanced in a condensed manner. The goals are a significant increase in the effectiveness of coding instruction, leading to an improvement in perceived competence and increased learner motivation. The teaching approach to be developed will be accompanied by an evaluation study at the Institute for Gender Studies at TH Köln to assess its effects and implement any necessary optimizations. To this end, a qualitative-quantitative survey of students and interviews with instructors are planned.