Using App Inventor and LEGO mindstorm NXT in a summer camp to attract high school girls to computing fields

摘要

With the ever-increasing role played by technological innovations in countries' development and economic growth, governments and educational institutes are keen to encourage and promote computing and engineering education among its young generations. In a developing country such as Saudi Arabia, we observed a certain knowledge gap in truly comprehending the true essence of computing as a science field. High school computing curriculum mainly tackles training students to use various applications and shallow programming instructions. Consequently, we observed that many college freshmen students chose the computing field (or avoid it) based on the misconception that it is mainly about dealing with Office applications or ‘fixing computers’. To change this misconception and attract students who are in a critical phase of choosing their future path and inform them off why they should consider computing as an option, we organized a two weeks summer camp. The summer camp focused on two interesting topics among teenagers, namely: mobile technologies and robotics. Accordingly, this paper presents an experience report describing our approach and evaluation from teaching a summer camp for high school girls using App Inventor and LEGO Mindstorm NXT.