junelin

Tufts is doing some great research in this area. They've seen kids as young as 5 learn these concepts by manipulating tangible blocks - https://ase.tufts.edu/DevTech/publications/computersandeduca...

There seem to be a few studies like this that have evaluated scratch over the course of 10 classes, but they've been largely inconclusive beyond the "general enjoyment" factor - http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/wilson-...

Hey @runesoerensen! We are going to be at the Creativity Museum in SF during the month of October, so tell him to keep his eye out and come by to play with the bots while we are there!

-June

(Play-i)

Haha, I don't think a 3-year-old would be able to learn Logo :)

Yes there was a lot of attrition from the initial experiment when they started with 42% because they let too many women in who didn't know what they were getting into and then decided that CS wasn't for them. The easiest intro to computer science class was essentially all women, and I think many of them dropped out.

But the fact that 30% of the graduating class in 2004 was women vs <7% in 2000 is still pretty impressive.

Carnegie Mellon has done some amazing work that has raised female enrollment in Computer Science from 7% in 1995 to 42% in 2000. We're going to do a follow-up examining what they've done. In fact, one of our female engineers went to CMU!

On page 25 of the NCWIT scorecard it states that in 2009 women earned:

57% of all undergraduate degrees, 52% of all math and science degrees, 59% of the undergraduate degrees in biology, 42% of mathematics degrees, 18% of all computer and information sciences undergraduate degrees

We cross-checked 2 other sources for 2012 numbers as well.

http://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/scorecard...

Hey Peter, I do agree that the title missed the mark and should have had a more positive spin. We didn't mean to put the blame on girls but merely to highlight the social and cultural factors that discourage girls from pursuing computer science.

Press does what press does. It was his fault for being irresponsible.