Our main metric is regular attendance, if young people want to come back we must be doing something right!
More formally, we’re using the STEM Impact assessment from STEM Learning. We apply this at the end of a young person’s first session, then after 8 weeks or when they complete their LINKS White award. Then we aim to gather data every 6 months. Our last review was in January 2020 and the summary data is shown below.
The four questions were;
- Engagement (did you enjoy your time with DigiLocal, would you like to continue)
- Aspiration (has DigiLocal made you want to find out more about coding)
- Skills / Knowledge (did you learn something from your project work)
- Careers (would you consider a career in coding / tech)
The response scale was 1 : Disagree Completely- to – 4 : Agree Completely
The yellow bars are the boys’ responses, the green the girls’ and orange are the combined values.
It’s notable that all our girls completely agreed that they were learning from our projects. This is something we are hugely proud of given the widely recognised inclusion challenges that high tech and coding has.
Our high engagement and aspiration scores are a testament to our amazing volunteer mentors who run each community club. Their passion comes through in supporting the young people and keeping motivation high over extended periods. Many of our young people have been attending DigiLocal clubs for over a year. Some are now running CodeClubs in their own schools.
Most of the young people we support are 8-12 years old, so it’s not entirely unsurprising that careers aren’t too high on their agenda. However, the general sentiment is positive towards tech and coding. We are actively working on new content and partnerships to extend our club support closer to the workplace.
Our thanks to STEM Learning and Graphic Science for developing the evaluation framework used.
