"It is the Future": Exploring Parent Perspectives of CS Education

Jaemarie Solyst, Laura Yao, Alexis Axon, Amy Ogan

Abstract: As schools begin offering more opportunities for computer science education, it is important to consider the viewpoints of all stakeholders. Parents, in particular, can have an outsize impact on their children's educational experience and attitudes towards STEM topics, but few studies investigate parent perceptions of CS, beliefs around whether and why learning CS is important for their children, and preferences for tools to learn programming. We ran a survey with 133 parent respondents of children in 6th to 12th grade to investigate perspectives on computing and CS education. Most parents viewed CS as important for their children to learn; however, fewer actively encouraged their child to engage with CS, and those who did tended to have higher prior knowledge in CS. In considering three types of educational programming interfaces (block, text, and hybrid), parents of varying experience levels preferred the hybrid tool, commonly because they believed that it could provide the best educational value. This work contributes to understanding parent stances and preferences on CS education, as they play an important role in supporting and facilitating their children's access to and experience in CS learning opportunities.