Early Programming Education and Career Orientation: The Effects of Gender, Self-Efficacy, Motivation and Stereotypes

Programming education currently begins at the elementary school age. In this paper we are exploring what affects the learning performance of young students in programming classes. We present the results collected during an eight-week experimental Scratch programming course run in elementary schools. We emphasize factors that have been found to affect learning performance in adult students, including self-efficacy and motivation, and measure how they affect students of this age group. We further explore the students' view of programming as a career path, and measure the effects of the course, their performance, and the stereotypes that they assume for computer scientists. We find that students' intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and previous programming experience are important factors, being strongly correlated with their self-efficacy and their inclination towards a CS career. For female students only, we also find CS career orientation to be strongly correlated with their self-efficacy.