Gender Effects of Computer Use in a Conceptual Physics Lab Course

It's always hard to know what to expect when bringing computers into an educational setting, as things are always changing. Student skills with computers are different today than they were 10 years ago, and 20 years ago almost counts as an alien world. Still, one hopes that some of these changes result in positive trends, such as student attitudes toward the use of computers in the classroom. During the course of the Wandering Interactive Lecture Demonstration Project,¹ we've seen a notable gender gap in some aspects of the previous experience of students, and worried that it might impact their learning. So we administered a number of surveys to see if we were right to be worried.