Disparity Between Textbook Examples and What Young Students Find Interesting

Abstract

To keep young students engaged in computer science, it is crucial to develop teaching material that they find interesting and relevant. Unfortunately, standard CS1 textbooks typically use examples that are uninspiring or inaccessible to young people. To better understand the disparity between textbook examples and student interests, we analyzed a collection of CS1 textbooks and compared the resulting topics to those elicited from young students via focus groups. We found 47% of textbook topics (out of 53 topics from 910 code examples) did not overlap with any topic mentioned by our participants. Conversely, among the topics elicited from the participants, we found 29% of these topics (out of 24 topics from 1936 items) missing from textbooks. To measure the overlap between these two data samples, we computed the Bhattacharyya coefficient and obtained 0.4452 indicating a strong difference between the two sets. These results lead us to advocate for changes in the teaching materials in order to make them more engaging for young students.