source : the age
Year 7 student Olivia is nurturing a budding love for coding.
“I think the whole thing is really fun,” said the 12-year-old, who attends a school on Brisbane’s southside.
Using introductory coding software, she made a game last year – getting an A, she proudly tells this masthead – and is eager to learn more.
But so far this year, she’s yet to get the chance.
“For the first semester, my class is doing art and the other class is doing digital technology, and then next semester at we swap,” Olivia said.
“It’s not that good because we should be doing more tech … we shouldn’t be split because it means we get less time.”
Olivia’s younger sister, Frankie, was pursuing an interest in marine sciences, and said she had only interacted with technology once or twice throughout her primary schooling to date.
“We did this thing where there was this robot … in grade 4,” Frankie explains.
“In grade 3 we got a little gist of [coding],” her older sister adds.
Recent research from the University of the Sunshine Coast examined gaps in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) offerings across Queensland schools – finding many schools were not delivering the full Australian curriculum due to a quirk in implementation on a state level.
The paper looked at roughly two-dozen schools across Queensland, finding that while every school treated maths and science subjects as compulsory in year 7 and 8, technology was often overlooked.
UniSC senior education lecturer Dr Natalie McMaster, who co-authored the research paper, said grade 7 and 8 was “the crux” for capturing students’ interest.
Patterns of which students disengage with STEM at this age were repeated in industry, the paper said. That included lower numbers of regional students, and girls who were sometimes discouraged by “gendered beliefs about STEM”.
Education researcher and co-author Dr Margaret Marshman said in high school, this translated into fewer girls studying higher level or specialised maths courses than their male peers.
“It’s not because they’re not capable, they just don’t have the confidence that the boys do,” Marshman said.
“The girls will be doing better than the boys, and they’ll still say they’re not as good.”
Marshman said gaps in technology subjects offered at schools could be tracked back to fewer teachers specialising in the field, which meant schools were routinely under-resourced.
However, within the Queensland curriculum, technology subjects – which include design and technologies, and digital technologies – were classed as a “flexible learning area”, which permitted schools to offer the subject as an elective, the paper found.
In schools like Olivia’s, this meant technology subjects competed for the same space in student timetables and attention spans as subjects like visual art, music, home economics or dance.
“It’s not a direct strain, but it’s more of an accidental pitting against each other of subjects that perhaps female students are more likely to want to pick,” McMaster said.
McMaster said schools also often siloed STEM subjects into upper primary and early secondary years, losing opportunities to teach “real-world” projects that blurred boundaries between science and technologies.
She said these learning experiences also gave students ideas about STEM careers they otherwise might not realise exist.
Sarah Moran, who co-founded the Girl Geek Academy to draw girls and women into the tech industry, said many girls coming to workshops found it hard to access engaging technology classes within their school, with many waylaid by stop-start programs.
“When they do those elective subjects, a lot of schools end up teaching them the stuff they learned in primary school again,” Moran said.
“The lack of consistency means that they’re not exposed to it enough to want to get good at it.”
Moran said some schools would continue teaching Scratch – which Olivia and Frankie first learned in year 3 – well into year 8, despite Queensland schools having access through the state curriculum to coding languages used for mobile devices.
“To be able to say, ‘we can work together to make an iPhone app,’ or ‘you can make your own iPad app,’ it’s like – hang on, that’s a different ball game,” Moran said.
“If you want to learn how to build iPad apps, you don’t get to do that in New South Wales, you don’t get to do that in Melbourne … we’re so good in some areas and so bad in others.”
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