Transdisciplinary invention projects based on traditional and digital fabrication technologies engage young people in designing and making complex artifacts and constitute a central aspect of future-oriented education. In Finland, comprehensive school students (aged 7-15) from all over the country can practice their inventive skills in the annual…

There is limited research on teaching and learning of programming in primary school and even less about aspects concerning teaching programming from teachers' viewpoint. In this study, we explore how Finnish 1-6 primary school teachers (N=91), teaching at schools with Swedish as the language of instruction, relate to programming and teaching of…

This longitudinal study investigates the impact of an extra-curricular programming workshop in student interest development in computer science. The workshop was targeted at 12-18-year old youngsters. A survey was sent to all previous participants with a known home address; 31.5% responded the survey (n = 197). This data was then combined with…

This study investigated students' perspectives on working and studying within a maker culture context. Participants were fifth-grade students (n = 18) in a Finnish elementary school who worked on a fabrication project for five days. The data consisted of student questionnaires (n = 18), group presentations (n = 5) and the final fabrication…

Short-term outreach interventions are conducted to raise young students' awareness of the computer science (CS) field. Typically, these interventions are targeted at K--12 students, attempting to encourage them to study CS in higher education. This study is based on a series of extra-curricular outreach events that introduced students to the…