A small-scale pilot study was conducted in north-west Tasmania to investigate adolescent girls' willingness to participate in informal STEM education, through exploring their perceptions and experiences of computer science (CS), and their future aspirations. This pilot study was funded by an Inspiring Australia Public Science Event Grant, enabling…

Building on the author's previous work on Australian national cinema and schooling, this article explores the representation of the female primary school teacher in the television mini-series entitled "Marion" (Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1974). Using narrative analysis, it argues that this representation is disruptive of…

Spatial reasoning--the ability to visualise and play with shapes in one's mind--is essential in many fields, and crucial in any Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics [STEM] discipline. It is, for example, the ability that the engineer needs to build bridges; the chemist to see the three-dimensional structure of a molecule; the architect to…

A multimedia university programme with relatively equal numbers of male and female students in elective programming subjects provided a rare opportunity to investigate female motivation to study and pursue computer programming in a career. The MSLQ was used to survey 85 participants. In common with research into deterrence of females from STEM…

This paper highlights key themes which emerged from schoolgirls' responses to focus group questions regarding perceptions of Information Communication Technology (ICT) subjects in the Queensland senior secondary curriculum, primarily, Information Processing Technology (IPT) and Information Technology Systems (ITS). The 2006 focus group interviews…

This paper reports on a series of introductory programming workshops, initially targeting female high school students, which utilised Lego Mindstorms robots. Cognitive load theory (CLT) was applied to the instructional design of the workshops, and a controlled experiment was also conducted investigating aspects of the interface. Results indicated…

"World of Warcraft" is an online computer game with over nine million players, many of them technically-minded young males. A proportion of these young males engage in spontaneous creative writing about their game adventures. They enjoy highly formulaic genres, such as the epic poem, with its complex technical requirements. This has…