Abstract:

The Girls in Computer Science project offers training of students from high schools in the State of Paraiba, promoting the training of girls through digital game workshops, application development and programming, as well as debates on gender equality in professions related to the area of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). The project was started in 2014 and has been developing face-to-face actions since then; however, with the Covid-19 pandemic, it was necessary to completely change the methodology used and, from March 2020, all meetings began to be remote. The entire methodology of face-to-face teaching needed to be adapted for remote teaching. In order to promote this transition, to provide a learning environment appropriate to the students' level of knowledge and also provide a short period of time for the adaptation of virtual tutors, we worked in three axes: Conduction of the meetings, Transmission of the knowledge and Learning assessment.

Regarding the conduction of the meetings, it was considered:
(i) What virtual environment to use?
(ii) How to conduct the workshops?
(iii) How to make content attractive? Regarding the transmission of the knowledge, the team analyzed:
(i) How to promote the engagement of the students?
(ii) How to make content accessible later?

Finally, regarding the learning assessment, it was planned how to perform effective evaluations in remote format, since the observation about the fulfillment of the content, the level of difficulties and other characteristics intrinsic to the digital environment could no longer be monitored on site. To conduct the virtual meetings the team evaluated the Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams platforms. Due to the greater familiarity and ease of use, since tutors also attended classes in this environment, it was decided to use Google Meet. As for how to present the workshops, it was decided that the slides would be adapted to a more detailed step-by-step and with less content in each session, which should last up to two hours. In order to make the content more attractive, more figures and videos were inserted in the presentations, in addition, a greater number of examples were presented to make the classes more interesting. It was also decided to register the meetings and make available on an open access platform, YouTube. To encourage the contact, interaction and engagement of students, it was decided to use the WhatsApp groups and Instagram, because it is the social network that most of them had knowledge and access to. In addition, we chose to promote both sessions of lives on the content, accompanied by discussions via chat, as well as lectures by Google Meet, in order to listen more to the students. Although a reasonable rate of initial engagement was achieved, there was a much higher dropout (75%) than in the face-to-face environment (25%), caused by work overload, lack of resources (computer, mobile phone, internet access) and lack of motivation to participate in remote classes, as reported by the participating students.

Keywords:

Covid-19 distance learning, digital techniques for distance learning, STEM and Covid-19 distance learning.