Jon Simpson
Fighting Engineers: Robots, Anecdotes, and Data
Interesting (as always) post on Mark Guzdial’s Computing Ed. blog about the danger of anecdotes shaping practice. I was particularly caught by this quote:
We find that Lego Robots don’t change girls attitudes about computing, doesn’t make them more interested in STEM fields, and doesn’t make them see themselves as doing computing. We find that PICO Crickets and Scratch do.
Reminded me of the SIGCSE 2009 paper “Do LEGO® Mindstorms® motivate students in CS1”. The article lends a nice balance to thoughts on the topic.