Judy Sheard

Selby Markham

Gordon Lowe

July 2000

The second Unisys Monash IT Summer School was held in January 2000, following the first held in January 1999. The IT Summer School is a six day residential camp organised by the Faculty of Information Technology (FIT) for secondary school students about to enter Year 11.

The program is advertised to all Victorian secondary schools. Each school is asked to nominate two of their high achieving students who may or may not be interested in studying IT at university or pursuing a career in IT. In 1999 and 2000 sixty students were selected to participate from over 300 applicants. The selection aims for an equal mix of gender, government and private school students, and metropolitan and country school students.

The students live in the Halls of Residence at the Clayton campus and partake in a program of activities designed to show them various aspects of IT and the range of IT undergraduate courses available to them in the FIT courses. The IT Summer School also aims to give them a "taste" of university life. A major focus of this program is an IT related project which students work on for a total of 20 hours during the week. In 2000 staff in four Schools within FIT designed, developed and presented the following projects:

• Smart House (School of Computer Science and Software Engineering)
• Met Ticketing (School of Information Management and Systems)
• Stock Exchange (School of Business Systems)
• Web Programming (School of Network Computing)

Details of the 2000 IT Summer School may be found at: http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/summerschool/2000/index.html

A pre Summer School survey was carried out in the second Summer School in January 2000 to determine students’ initial interest in aspects of IT, intentions of studying IT at school and at the tertiary level, and intentions of pursuing a career in IT. A post Summer School survey was used to gauge if there were any changes in these. All the Summer School attendants, a total of 60 students, participated in the study.

A copy of the pre Summer School survey form can be found at: http://www.sd.monash.edu.au/selby/techreports/PreSurvey.pd

A copy of the post Summer School survey form can be found at: http://www.sd.monash.edu.au/selby/techreports/PostSurvey.pdf

All the students who attended the IT Summer School participated in the study (n=60). The students were allocated to the project groups as follows:

Numbers of students in each project group classified according to gender, type of school attended and school location.

Only one student of the 60 at the Summer School didn’t have access to a computer at home

For the following questions the students were asked how much use they made of computers for various activities. A 7-point Likert scale was used, where 1 indicates no use and 7 indicates lots of use. NR is used to indicate no response was given to the question.

For each classification the students used computers significantly more for schoolwork at home than at school. The standard deviations for both questions indicate there was more variation in the use of computers at school than at home.

For each of the above five questions t-tests were used to determine any differences in the means obtained for the students’ usage of computers when classified according to gender, type of school attended, or location of school. The only significant differences (p <= 0.05) occurred for gender. The male students used computers significantly more than female students for games and general use.

The students were asked what programming languages they had used or studied. The mean number of programming languages is shown in the table below. Only five students had no prior experience with a programming language. Three students claimed to have experience with six languages and these were all male.

t-tests were used to determine any differences in the means obtained when students were classified according to gender, type of school attended, or location of school. The only difference (p <= 0.05) occurred for gender. The male students had significantly more experience with programming languages than the female students.

For the pre Summer School survey results, the responses for female and male students are shown. This is the only classification of the student groups considered (i.e. gender, school type and school location) that gave any significant differences.

For these questions students were asked to rate how interested they were in different aspects of IT. A 7-point Likert scale was used, where 1 indicates low interest and 7 indicates high interest. NR is used to indicate no response was given to the question.

Both the female and male students showed the most interest in the Internet (Web or WWW) and Multimedia and the small standard deviations indicate there was strong agreement in their opinions on this. The male students showed significantly more interest in programming, software development, software engineering, building or designing computer hardware, robotics and artificial intelligence.

The female students showed most interest in the following aspects of IT:

• The Internet (Web or WWW)
• Multimedia (video, sound etc)
• Virtual reality

and the least interest in:

• Building or designing computer hardware
• Electronic commerce
• Robotics

The male students showed most interest in the following aspects of IT:

• The Internet (Web or WWW)
• Multimedia (video, sound etc
• Programming
• Software development

and the least interest in:

• Electronic commerce

Significantly more female students had studied or intended to study IT at school for VCE. An interesting result considering that the female students showed significantly less or the same interest than the male students in various aspects of IT, as shown in the previous question.

The mean ranking in preference for a computing course was one place higher for the male students than the female students. This was a significantly higher ranking. The standard deviations show there was more variation amongst the female students in their ranking of a computing course in their list of preferences. Also the higher percentage of no responses for the female students probably indicates that more female students did not intend to put a computing course in their list of preferences. This is despite the fact that significantly more female than male students were studying or intended to study IT at school.

There was no significant difference between females and males in the amount of IT they would like in their university course.

A 7-point Likert scale was used, where 1 indicates no interest and 7 indicates high interest.

The male students had significantly more interest in a career in IT than the female students.

There was no significant difference between females and males in the percentage of IT that they wanted in their career.

The post Summer School survey results are shown for the whole group. There were no significant changes in the responses for any questions for the whole group, or any classifications based on gender, school type or school location. However for most questions the number of no responses given decreased significantly.

For these questions students were asked to rate how interesting different aspects of IT were. A 7-point Likert scale was used, where 1 indicates low interest and 7 indicates high interest. NR is used to indicate no response was given to the question.

After the Summer School the students showed most interest in the following aspects of IT:

• The Internet (Web or WWW)
• Multimedia (video, sound etc)
• Programming
• Virtual reality

After the Summer School the students showed least interest in the following aspects of IT:

• Electronic commerce
• Building or designing computer hardware
• Robotics

There were no significant differences before and after the Summer School in the students’ interest in each aspect of IT and in every case there were significant correlations between the students’ interest before and after the Summer School. The strongest relationship in pre and post Summer School interest was for programming, electronic commerce, software engineering.

75% of the students intended to study IT at school for VCE.

There were no significant differences pre and post Summer School in the students’ interest in studying IT at university.

A 7-point Likert scale was used, where 1 indicates no interest and 7 indicates high interest.

There was a significant correlation between students’ pre and post Summer School interest in a career in computing and there was no significant change in the students’ interest in IT as a career.

There was no significant change in the percentage of IT students wanted in their career.

The students were divided into high and low users based on their responses for computer usage for schoolwork (questions 5 and 6) and general use (questions 7,8 and 9) in the pre Summer School survey.

At the end of the Summer School there were the following significant changes in interest in IT for these groups:

• Low computer users for schoolwork showed more interest in electronic commerce
• Low computer users for schoolwork showed more interest in a career in computing
• Low computer users for general use showed more interest in programming
• High computer users for general use showed more interest in software development eg writing games

Female students showed the following strong relationships for computer usage:

• Use of computers at school for their schoolwork and use of computers for general use
• Use of computers at school for their schoolwork and use of computers for communication
• Use of computers at home for their schoolwork and use of computers for general use
• Use of computers for communication and for general use

Male students showed the following strong relationships for computer usage:

• Use of computers for communication and for general use

Government school students showed the following strong relationships for computer usage:

• Use of computers for communication and for general use
• Use of computers for games and general use

Private school students showed the following strong relationships for computer usage:

• Use of computers at home for their schoolwork and use of computers for general use
• Use of computers at home for their schoolwork and use of computers for communication
• Use of computers for communication and for general use

There were strong relationships between different types of computer usage for Suburban school students:

Country school students showed the following strong relationships for computer usage:

• Use of computers at home for their schoolwork and use of computers for general use
• Use of computers at home for their schoolwork and use of computers for communication
• Use of computers for communication and for general use
• Use of computers for games and for general use