CS education is shaped by gendered cultural norms, and differences in assessment performance between men and women persist in many countries. Over multiple years, we observed noteworthy and significant, although inconsistent, differences between male and female students in our CS1 course's exam grades. We build on previous research that performance differences between men and women result from repeated interaction with biased learning environments rather than individual ability differences. In our context, we query gender bias in the design of high-stakes exams. Our hypothesis is that use of real-world settings of programming questions that are perceived as gendered amplify exclusion by embedding stereotype-evoking contextual cues.

CS0 and CS1 courses are becoming an essential part of many social science programs, including sociology and political science. This particular assignment was designed as part of the 'Basics of Programming in Python' course for undergraduate political science students. The course aims not only to prepare students for the unified programming exam, but also to apply concepts of computational thinking in the context of political science problems. By linking these fields, students learn to overcome inner barriers in coding and explore the potential of computational social science methods for both academic path and career.

The introductory course in basics of programming aims to teach second-year political science students the basic skills of applied programming that are crucial for transferring their research ideas into computational models. As one of students' first interactions with computer science concepts, the course assists in overcoming their barriers in programming, and introduces them to ways of applying computational thinking. In addition, the course material can serve as a launching pad for further development in the areas of modelling social problems, its simulations and quantitative analysis. This paper presents course design considerations, shares findings in assignment design, and raises questions to consider when designing CS0 and CS1 courses for social science students.