Empowering women to code

Playful learning with Karel

Abstract

Programming skills are essential across STEM and data-intensive fields, yet many students, particularly women, experience anxiety and lack confidence in their coding abilities. To address these issues, we developed an extracurricular coding challenge using Karel the Robot for undergraduate and postgraduate business students enrolled in introductory data science units. We conducted a mixed-methods study to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. Participants who engaged with the challenge reported an increase in positive sentiment towards programming and confidence. Notably, women exhibited larger gains in confidence than men, despite facing the stereotype about gendered ability. These findings indicate that playful and low-stakes environments can empower underrepresented learners.