What do Secondary School Students Associate with the Digital World?

In 2006, the European Union defined digital competence as one of eight key competences for lifelong learning. As a result, a process of defining "education in the digital world" began, which is not yet completed. But what is the digital world anyway from the students' points of view? In this paper, we present answers to this question given by 198 students, who were in grades 5, 8, 9, 10, 11 or 12 of German secondary schools. As part of an association test, we asked them first for the terms they think of, when they hear the term "digital world", and repeated this procedure afterwards with the pair of terms "digital world and computer science". They often associated terms such as computer, cell phone and internet, but also programming, communication, and social networks, but could only partially relate their terms to computer science. Our results show that the age, gender, extent of computer science education received and the free time students spent on computer science topics influenced the associations they gave. Especially for the variable age differences in the level of abstraction of the given answers could be identified. Furthermore, the results indicate, in which areas it might be worthwhile in follow-up studies to investigate learners' interests.