Introducing Computational Thinking at Vocational High Schools

The Technovation Girls program (TG) is an after-school program, where teams of female school students follow a software ideation process to address one of the UN's Sustainable Development goals. Concretely, they prototype a mobile application which they later pitch to judges. The TG curriculum gives students the tools they need to carry out this challenge, with activities focusing on entrepreneurship, product ideation and pitching, as well as coding. Previous evaluations of this program have focused on student and mentor perceptions and attitudes, collected through surveys, observation, focus groups and interviews. In this paper, we evaluate the effect that the coding part of the TG curriculum has on students' computational thinking skills, specifically in Chile, where the TG curriculum was expanded to a year to account for differences in the school curriculum. Also, in this experience, the TG program was carried out during class hours, and at both single- and mixed-gender vocational high schools. We applied an existing computational thinking test to the 2020 cohort (approx. 1000 students), before and after participating in the program, analyzing the results by school, gender and age. We found a slight improvement in test scores, with a more positive effect in male students.