Computing Education for Informed Usage Decision-Making

About the project

The task of computer science education is to enable students to make informed decisions as responsible citizens - especially with regard to the use of digital systems in everyday life (informed usage decisions):

Although the functionality of many digital systems, such as various social networks, smart home systems or payment methods, appear almost identical, there are fundamental differences in how they work and their impact on society and the users themselves.

In order to be able to make an informed usage decision between several such systems, users must choose from the available digital systems based on their own goals and values.

This requires IT skills, as the following example shows: If you want to decide between several social media services, you can consider many different goals and values. For example, if freedom and independence are particularly important to you, it is not enough to simply pay attention to the design or user experience: It needs to be clarified who has access to personal data, who can delete content and ban users, so ultimately who has the power in this system and whether they can be trusted. In order to be able to answer these questions, knowledge about data storage, encryption, but also the architecture of the system and the operator is required.

So far, the focus of computing education research has been on how digital systems are explained, perceived or their consequences assessed - but not on how this knowledge is applied to make decisions.

This project therefore investigates the role of computing education in making informed decisions about the use of digital systems, the obstacles students face when applying computing skills in the decision-making process and how computing skills can be promoted for making informed decisions.

Gebhardt, L. & Michaeli, T. (2025). Informatische Bildung für informierte Nutzungsentscheidungen in digitalen Systemen. In: Girnus, L., Panreck, IC., Partetzke, M. (eds) Zwischen Technokratisierung und Demokratieanspruch. Politische Bildung (pp. 163-180). Springer VS, Wiesbaden. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-45949-9_9

Gebhardt, L., Leinweber, M. & Michaeli, T. (2023). Investigating the Role of Computing Education for Informed Usage Decision Making. In Proceedings of the 18th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education, WIPSCE23 (pp. 1-2). USA: ACM. Cambridge, UK. doi.org/10.1145/3605468.3609776

Gebhardt, L., Leinweber, M., Jacob, F., & Hartenstein, H. (2022). Grasping the Concept of Decentralized Systems for Instant Messaging. In: Proceedings of the 17th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education, ACM