Outreach in K-12 Programming: A Systematic Literature Review on

Audience and Purpose

Agnese Addone and Vittorio Scarano

Dipartimento di Informatica, Universit

a di Salerno, Italy

Keywords:

Computing Education, CS Education, Outreach, Outreach Programs, Programming, K-12, Teachers Profes-

sional Development, Novices.

Abstract:

Outreach Programs are informal educational initiatives that schools and universities, as well as companies and

associations, promote: they represent a signiﬁcant variety of courses and camps for learners, whether students

or teachers. In this paper we provide an overview of the publications on Outreach Programs in K-12 Program-

ming, in the last decade 2011-2021. The survey methodology adopted is the Systematic Literature Review:

we classiﬁed the papers around two different axis, the audience and purpose of the Outreach Programs.

1 INTRODUCTION

Although in literature there is not a global unique def-

inition of what K-12 Outreach Programs (OP) are,

we can include among them every informal, non-

curricular initiative that implement or enrich the stu-

dents’ school curriculum or the Teachers’ Profes-

sional Development (TPD). OP promote a different

point of view, a given methodology, or a new tech-

nology that can have an impact on learners’ future

choices towards Computer Science (CS). The peda-

gogy adopted is non-formal and boosts learners’ self-

directed learning, creativity, collaboration and peer

mentoring while removing social and emotional bar-

riers. These programs are informal initiatives, both

promoted by schools and universities or private com-

panies and associations, conducted in parallel to ordi-

nary CS school planning.

Sometimes we can ﬁnd a deﬁnition of OP in na-

tional or regional initiatives, designed by govern-

ments through their educational agencies or min-

istries, that massively address a whole segment of

school population in a country. The realization of the

OP is an important action to promote Computing Ed-

ucation (CED) in schools and to increase the moti-

vation to choose CS careers during the transition to

higher education. Often, universities and colleges es-

tablish an outreach ofﬁce and a responsible to ensure

the OP quality and a connection to the stakeholders.

Programming is a very popular topic in OP, as it

motivates kids in getting closer to STEM (Science,

technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disci-

plines (Kafai and Burke, 2014) and, having Computa-

tional Thinking as its theoretical framework (Resnick

and Silverman, 2005; Weintrop and Wilensky, 2015;

Weintrop et al., 2016), can also foster students in pur-

suing a CS career during their transition from school

to University. Even if these programs are mainly de-

signed for students, there are also complementary out-

reach programs that target school teachers and their

professional development. Whether they are novices

or majors in programming, these courses seem to sup-

port educators in motivating students in CS.

Related Works. In spite of their diffusion, in Com-

puter Science Education research OP are not consid-

ered as a speciﬁc topic per se (Decker et al., 2016),

but rather part of the research on CED and primarily

on introductory programming. The studies on how

novices learn computing, and teachers teach them

how to, introduce single aspects of these initiatives as,

for example, their audiences and targets, or topics, or

languages and tools, or educational approaches and

impact. (Begel and Ko, 2019). The most extensive

review (Luxton-Reilly et al., 2018) is a broad anal-

ysis on a huge corpus of publications on introduc-

tory programming and shows the educational trends

emerging in the ﬁfteen years until 2017. Another

Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is also focused

on introductory programming and outreach in schools

from 2003 to 2017 (Szabo et al., 2019). It reports

many initiatives to engage K-12 students in CS and

to boost their interest and motivation in programming

languages, tools and programs, both in the curricu-

276

Addone, A. and Scarano, V.

Outreach in K-12 Programming: A Systematic Literature Review on Audience and Purpose.

DOI: 10.5220/0011063400003182

In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2022) - Volume 2, pages 276-283

ISBN: 978-989-758-562-3; ISSN: 2184-5026

lum or in the outreach learning contexts. A third SLR

(Becker and Quille, 2019) is focused on CS1, a spe-

ciﬁc course and curriculum on introductory program-

ming, along ﬁfty years of research on the topic. It

offers a classiﬁcation of the initiatives and method-

ologies. Besides these reviews, our survey returned

12 overviews of the research on OP. These papers are

mainly SLRs or, at times, small surveys concerning a

single audience group, both an audience and a topic,

or the educational purpose and the impact of inter-

ventions. In the considered decade, the ﬁrst survey

(Ladner and VanDeGrift, 2011) helped us in classify-

ing by audience/target, school level, educational ap-

proach and students’ perceptions. Two works from

2014 concern OP addressing the audience of novice

and prospective students and they are both from the

Australasian research area (Falkner et al., 2014; Bell

et al., 2014). In 2015 a survey (Seiter, 2015) on

learning outcomes puts the accent on the impact of

these initiatives. Another couple of papers from 2016

considers OP as a way to engage students in com-

puting. The ﬁrst one is on female students’ percep-

tions (McGill et al., 2016) and the second one on gen-

der equity in computing (Hamilton et al., 2016). In

2017 we ﬁnd a very important paper on pre-college

computing activities to broaden participation in CS

(Decker and McGill, 2017). Another 2019 SLR de-

scribes speciﬁcally a group of OP for K-12 under-

represented groups. (Cummings et al., 2019) A 2020

article concerns an experiment conducted with fresh-

men and near-peer tutors chosen among CS students.

While analyzing the impact of the outreach work-

shops on participants, the authors give also a SLR on

the programs (Jin et al., 2020).

Research Questions. The audience of the courses

appears to be the main purpose in the design of the

OP.

These initiatives, despite their informal learning

environment, identify a variety of target groups ac-

cording to their age, school level, gender, social iden-

tity.

Concerning this point, we came up with three re-

search questions:

• RQ1 - Which audiences do OP address?

• RQ2 - Which audiences are less represented in the

literature?

• RQ3 - Which are the purpose planned for each OP

audience?

RQ1 means to express an overview of the ﬁndings in

literature, and then a classiﬁcation of papers based on

the targets of the programs.

While RQ1 appears all-encompassing and settles

the state of the review, with RQ2 we intend to go in

depth and deﬁne the less represented groups and, if

possible, suggest a reason of their minor presence in

the SLR.

Finally, RQ3 aims to identify the different OP pur-

poses, given that some initiatives are designed on a

well deﬁned purpose and others on a motivational ac-

tion or expected impact on learners’ attitudes towards

computing.

2 METHODOLOGY

SLR. The survey on the OP that promote program-

ming at the K-12 school stage is conducted under the

methodology of the Systematic Literature Review. It

includes studies on both categories of learners, stu-

dents and teachers, excluding incoherent results, like

OP for professionals.

The survey is made through the ACM Digital Li-

brary search engine, both the Full-Text Collection

(FTC) and the Guide to Computing Literature (GCL).

After a certain number of attempts, the combined

search phrase:

“outreach programs” AND “programming” AND (“K-12”

OR “students” OR “teachers” OR “school”)

returned 155 results from the FTC and 175 results

form the GCL.

Time Range. The publication dates range from

1985 to 2021, but the trend increases signiﬁcantly

from 2011 on. So we decided to consider and ana-

lyze the last decade (2011-2021), that is a total num-

ber of 134 papers on FTC and 145 papers on GCL.

Except 2 excluded results (not relevant to our search),

we deﬁned a total set of 143 papers coherent with the

search query. The survey returned data on the publi-

cation trend by year in the decade, then we also clas-

siﬁed papers in two main classes by audience/target

and purpose.

2.1 Audience

The audience label is attributed to each paper or ini-

tiative whose purpose refers to a group that beneﬁts

from the outreach in relation to an educational or so-

cial afﬁnity, or even gender or cultural belonging.

We classiﬁed the total number of 143 papers as

follows:

• Novice students in CED, 60 results;

• Prospective students in CS, 33 results;

Outreach in K-12 Programming: A Systematic Literature Review on Audience and Purpose

277

• Girls and women, 23 results;

• Underrepresented (by ethnicity, gender, both)

groups, 20 results.

• Rural area groups, 4 results;

• Physically impaired students, 3 results.

The ﬁrst group of papers concerns OP designed for

novices, meaning all those learners who approach

computing principles, languages and tools for the ﬁrst

time. In this audience we also included the teachers

actively involved in a TPD, both novices and those

who already teach CS but need to upgrade (Crow

et al., 2019), because of their common intention to im-

prove their computing competences (Chipman et al.,

2019).

While novices approach computing for the ﬁrst

time, we denominated as prospective students those

who intend to choose, or are selected as target, to em-

brace a CS career.

Another signiﬁcant group of papers refers to OP

designed for girls and women, to motivate them in

approaching CS and to overcome cultural misconcep-

tions about their own role in the technology ﬁeld. The

main objective of these OP is to ﬁll the gender gap in

the access to STEM, and to break cultural inequalities

and stereotypes about women.

In our classiﬁcation women are considered as a

distinct audience, although we found their presence

overlapping in other programs, designed for different

groups and collectively gathered with underrepre-

sented students (social disadvantaged or ethnic mi-

norities groups). The reason is that these OP de-

clare an educational and social resolution to guarantee

equal access to CS and to remove misconceptions on

computing and computer scientists.

A target label is attributed to each paper that

clearly indicates a group of people who beneﬁts from

the outreach, in relation to age and education level.

The target addressed is mainly the school students

population, and papers often include 2 or 3 school lev-

els at once; however, among the total we can identify

initiatives speciﬁcally and exclusively designed for el-

ementary (25 results), middle (45 results) high school

(69 results). There are OP for the TPD (20 results

until 2019) and others for undergraduate students (36

results), often related to the mentoring activity they

practice with middle and high school students. The

total number of 143 papers comprehends 34 studies

that overlap on two or three different targets at once.

This indicates that some programs, even if designed

for different targets, maintain the same educational

purpose and reshape the activities according to the

school level and competences.

2.2 Purpose

The papers are classiﬁed also by purpose of the OP.

Often, it indicates also the main topic addressed by

the outreach, setting aside a possible overlapping

with secondary ones. While some topics are di-

rectly CS sub-ﬁelds or a speciﬁc technology adopted,

some others show strategies for the engagement of

the participants, analyze their behaviour and motiva-

tion in addressing the discipline, clarify their percep-

tions/misconceptions on CS. The papers are divided

in the following purposes:

• Programming, 41 results;

• Motivational, 37 results;

• Computational Thinking, 25 results;

• Perceptions, 11 results;

• Robotics, 8 results;

• Game development, 5 results;

• Unplugged coding, 4 results;

• Networks, 4 results;

• Microcontrollers, 3 results;

• Accessibility, 2 results.

• Cybersecurity, 2 results;

• High Performance Computing, 1 result.

The Programming purpose gathers the OP on intro-

ductory or advanced programming. The audience of

the ﬁrst topic, largely predictable, are mostly novices

because it represents the very initial approach to CS.

This group is followed by women, as the researchers

try to enhance female motivation and perseverance in

CS and to promote their transition to STEM degrees

with creative and collaborative activities. Beside this

group we can ﬁnd substantially related OP on CT, un-

plugged coding and game development. A group of

activities concern physical computing, as working on

robotics or with microcontrollers, or speciﬁc aspects

of computing, like the accessibility or the cybersecu-

rity issues, the networks or the HPC.

Other programs are principally designed to boost

behavioral aspects of CED and offer motivational

sparks to pursue CS careers; some analyze the stu-

dents’ perceptions on this ﬁeld and on the role of

computer scientists; both these OP attempt to remove

learners misconceptions, to enhance learners’ self-

efﬁcacy and to promote positive attitudes towards the

discipline.

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278

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The analysis of the papers is described in this section;

the results are shown in Table 2 and graphically sum-

marized in Figure 1.

Women. The survey found 23 papers related to girls

and women. The publications increase in 2016 when

we register 6 articles, 2 of which are SLR about gen-

der equity and female participation. The target ad-

dressed is mostly from high school (12 results), fol-

lowed by middle (7 results) and elementary (5 results)

schools. The initiatives are mainly small-scale (e.g.

under 100 participants, 11 results) but there is also a

certain number (8 results) of large-scale programs, for

instance those addressing a whole college female tar-

get. The most frequent topic addressed in these OP is

programming (11 results). This audience group does

not report the initiatives in which women are consid-

ered together with social and ethnic minorities as un-

derrepresented groups.

These OP are mainly designed to foster women

participation in Computer Science. The researchers

suggest that the female motivation towards CS and

STEM disciplines is more effective when raised early,

e.g. addressed to a K-12 audience and when pro-

grams are offered at a young age (Assiter and Wise-

man, 2016; Chipman et al., 2018; Tsan et al., 2016).

However, the most recent studies underline also the

existing link between the actions needed in school and

in university: to guarantee the female engagement in

CS, the OP involve undergraduate students in men-

toring high school students (Geller and Chun, 2021;

McDonald and Dillon, 2021; Molnar et al., 2021).

These programs have often a positive impact, ensur-

ing the girls’ appreciation for programming and con-

sequently their choice of a CS career during the tran-

sition from high school to college (Lang et al., 2016;

Lawlor et al., 2020). Some papers report studies on

girls’ motivation in CS and how to foster it (Sabin

et al., 2015), others point on the perceptions women

have (Lang et al., 2016), on how to overcome both

their misconceptions in CS and the cultural bias on the

role and gender of the computer scientist (Rheingans

et al., 2018). The SLR report the initiatives to achieve

digital gender equity and to increase female participa-

tion in CS (McGill et al., 2016; Hamilton et al., 2016).

Novice. The audience of novice students in CS con-

cerns 60 papers. The time distribution of publications

is generally constant, with two peaks in 2012 (8 re-

sults) and 2014 (11 results). The largest target ad-

dressed is the school one, with high (22 results), mid-

dle (21 results) and elementary (12 results), but there

is a signiﬁcant part (16 results) on Teachers’ Profes-

sional Development (TPD) initiatives. The outreach

are small-scale programs (26 results) and large-scale

(23 results), with a little number of regional OP (6

results), covering national programs in US, NZ and

Europe (2014 and 2019). The subjects addressed are

mainly programming (19 results) and Computational

Thinking (CT) (16 results), with increasing results in

2014; a few papers on unplugged coding (4 results,

until 2016 and no results from 2017 on), robotics (2

results until 2015) and game development (3 results

until 2020), give place in 2021 to accessibility (2 re-

sults) and cybersecurity (1 result).

The subjects addressed, as the OP are intended

for novice learners, concentrate on programming and

Computational Thinking: probably, the amount of re-

sults in 2014 correspond to the emerging global ini-

tiatives of CS divulgation as CoderDojo, Code.org,

CS4all, etc. These programs and platforms and the

huge participation they got and currently get, gener-

ated a literature that describe and analyze the informal

approaches to teaching and learning CS. The presence

of TPD initiatives highlights the importance of a sys-

temic approach in designing programs. Students and

teachers are key players of the same educational sys-

tem, and they act in a complementary way (Hampton

et al., 2019; Roberts et al., 2018). The continuing

education of teachers increase the impact on pupils’

awareness: students and teachers must be equally mo-

tivated to undertake CS and to get aware of the role of

technology in studying and teaching (Chipman et al.,

2019), but also in their digital citizenship. For this

reason, besides some reviews on the state of novice

programming teaching and learning, we can also ﬁnd

advises on curriculum design, educational strategies,

assessment of the activities and competences acquired

(Catet

e et al., 2018), in addition to some reﬂections on

myths and misconceptions about CS.

Prospective. The survey regards 33 papers. The

time distribution of publications registers a peak in

2011 (9 results), a progressive decreasing from 2012,

a signiﬁcant reduction from 2016 to 2021 and there

are no results for the years 2015 and 2017. The tar-

get addressed is mostly the high school students (22

results); few papers for middle (9 results), elemen-

tary (6 results), TPD (3 results), and undergraduate (8

results). Small- and large scale programs equal (14

results each), while a little number of regional OP (3

results) report national massive programs in Australia

and Europe in the last two years (2020 and 2021).

The purposes addressed concentrate on the stu-

dents’ perceptions (6 results) of what CS and who a

computer scientist is (Lakanen and K

arkk

ainen, 2019;

Outreach in K-12 Programming: A Systematic Literature Review on Audience and Purpose

279

Table 1: The papers analyzed by audience and target.

Women Novice Prospec. Underrep. Impaired Rural Total

Elementary 5 12 6 - - 2 25

Middle 7 21 9 6 1 1 45

High School 12 22 22 8 3 2 69

Teacher Professional Dev. - 16 3 - - 1 20

Undergraduate 9 9 8 9 1 - 36

Total 23 60 33 20 3 4 143

Table 2: The papers analyzed by audience and topics.

Women Novice Prospec. Underrep. Impaired Rural Total

Programming 11 19 4 4 2 1 41

Motivational 7 9 11 9 - 1 37

Computational thinking 1 16 5 2 - 1 25

Perceptions 3 1 6 1 - - 11

Robotics - 2 3 1 1 1 8

Gamedev - 3 2 - - - 5

Unplugged - 4 - - - - 4

Networks - 3 1 - - - 4

Microcontrollers 1 - - 2 - - 3

Accessibility - 2 - - - - 2

Cybersecurity - 1 1 - - - 2

High Performance Comp. - - - 1 - - 1

Total 23 60 33 20 3 4 143

Kallback-Rose et al., 2012; Stone, 2019), and design

motivational initiatives (11 results) to engage learners

in pursuing CS careers. Besides these topics, some

OP promote programming (4 results), CT (5 results),

robotics (3 results), game development (2 results), cy-

bersecurity and networks (1 result each).

The audience of prospective students in CS is con-

sidered as the target that can be motivated in com-

puting in view of a transition from school to a CS

degree. Considering the undergraduate, we can ﬁnd

some analysis of the motivation and the strategies to

retain students in CS.

Underrepresented. The survey returned 20 papers.

The time distribution of publications registers a peak

in 2011 (6 results) and a progressive decreasing from

2013 to 2021; no results for the year 2012. The target

addressed is mostly from high (8 results) and middle

schools (6 results); a signiﬁcant group of papers ad-

dress the undergraduate population (9 results). Small-

and large scale programs are the majority (7 and 10

results respectively), and just 1 result for regional OP.

The purposes addressed are mainly the students’ per-

ceptions about CS (9 results) and the role of the com-

puter scientist in our society (DeWitt et al., 2017) to

promote CS role models as a key to overcome miscon-

ceptions and remove cultural barriers. Besides these

topics, we can also ﬁnd programming (4 results), CT

and microcontrollers (2 results each), robotics and

HPC (1 result each).

The audience of underrepresented categories in

CS is vast and comprehend social and ethnic minori-

ties, as well as women from the same groups. This tar-

get needs speciﬁc strategies to be involved and moti-

vated in computing (Camp et al., 2020), because they

are often living at the boundaries of our society. These

OP promote diversity and inclusion in CS, removing

barriers to access computing education and university

careers (Garcia et al., 2020). For this target we can

dents in CS, by providing equitable access and critical

thinking skills.

Impaired. Our survey found only 4 papers on im-

paired audience in OP. The time distribution of publi-

cations registers only two years of publication, 2011

and 2020, with 2 results each. The target addressed

is mostly from high schools (3 results); 1 result is for

higher education. Small - scale programs are the ab-

solute majority (4 results). The subjects addressed

concentrate mostly on programming (2 results) and

robotics (1 result).

The audience of impaired students in OP is fully

occupied by visually impaired and blind people. This

target needs speciﬁc strategies and technologies to ac-

cess computing, for example in robotics (Ludi et al.,

2014), and researchers design the programs to remove

barriers to easily access CED and university careers

(Shinohara et al., 2020). We register initiatives that

aim to motivate and retain students in CS and to guar-

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280

Figure 1: Targets and purposes chosen for each audience.

antee an equitable access. The choice to realize small

- scale programs demonstrates how complex is to de-

sign and conduct these initiatives and, at the same

time (Ludi et al., 2011), to gather a class of the same

target students.

Rural area - The OP for students that come from

rural areas are a little number (4 results), generally

addressed to elementary and high schools (2 results

each); 1 program regards also the TPD in the same

schools. The time distribution of publications starts

in 2015 and reaches 2021, but no results are found for

the years 2016, 2017 and 2019. Small - scale pro-

grams are the majority (2 results). The subjects ad-

dressed vary from robotics to programming, from CT

to motivational OP (1 result each).

These audiences, students and teachers, are

reached by speciﬁc social strategies in order to access

computing; the initiatives are designed to remove cul-

tural barriers and to promote the choice of future ca-

reers in computing. The choice of small - scale pro-

grams demonstrates the complexity in designing these

initiatives (Bell et al., 2018; Fasy et al., 2020), as stu-

dents often have logistic problems like reaching the

venue in autonomy; researchers face issues to create

a class of the same target.

4 CONCLUSIONS

Although focused on programming, the survey re-

turned a wider overview on K-12 CED and its stake-

holders. It revealed a variety of audiences, among

which novice students are the most addressed by out-

reach agents. This feature matches to the informal

nature of these camps, ideal learning environments

for introducing CS concepts while working collabo-

ratively. Female targets have a considerable presence,

too, and these programs mark the necessity to break

cultural stereotypes and to boost women’s participa-

tion in STEM, while conﬁrming a political and re-

search trend towards inclusion topics.

On the other hand, the few results on outreach for

rural area and impaired groups marks the difﬁculty to

design and perform these programs with speciﬁc au-

diences, with a sum of issues ranging from logistics

(physical spaces easy to reach, transports, routes) to

adapting languages and tools to the different disabil-

ities and impairments, from infrastructures (Internet

access, laboratories) to the complexity of recruiting a

signiﬁcant number of participants, from accessibility

to social inclusion issues.

Among purposes, programming is the most com-

mon and overlaps with other goals selected by the OP

designers, as robotics or game development activities.

These camps are relatively easy to conceive and orga-

nize also by private companies or associations and can

beneﬁt from the huge amount of platforms, languages

and tools speciﬁcally intended for educational scope.

Computational thinking, chosen mainly for novices,

is another appealing topic that highlights how impor-

tant are reasoning and solving problems while learn-

ing to program (Lin and Weintrop, 2021). Conversely,

the few results for game development, unplugged

coding, accessibility and cybersecurity could suggest

less interest or research commitment on these top-

ics, except for sporadic OP addressed to novice and

prospective students.

Physically impaired students (blind, deaf, Autism

Spectrum Disorders -ASD) or with learning disorders

(dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, Attention-Deﬁcit /

Hyperactivity Disorder - ADHD) are often excluded

from CS in school because of their impairments but

they can take advantage from dedicated OP, where op-

erators can also boost and adapt methodologies, lan-

guages, technologies and tools to their needs. As a

future direction, it would be very challenging, but re-

warding in terms of societal impact, to delve deeper

and analyze which factors and in what measure affect

the design of these experiences, in order to promote

initiatives directly aimed at those less represented au-

diences.

Adhering to the paradigm of Open Science, we

will share the results of the SLR by publishing the

whole dataset/bibliography (in the ﬁnal version), with

an open licence, on GitHub and Zenodo. The repos-

itory is meant to facilitate scholars with a classiﬁca-

tion and to stimulate further work or design on OP. As

we encountered other aspects in addition to audience

and purpose of the OP, we also consider to expand the

analysis and to employ more elaborate statistical tools

and methodologies to explain and comprehend these

elements and their relations to others.

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