Pirate plunder: game-based computational thinking using scratch blocks

Policy makers worldwide argue that children should be taught how technology works, and that the ‘computational thinking’ skills developed through programming are useful in a wider context. This is causing an increased focus on computer science in primary and secondary education. Block-based programming tools, like Scratch, have become ubiquitous in primary education (5 to 11-years-old) throughout the UK. However, Scratch users often struggle to detect and correct ‘code smells’ (bad programming practices) such as duplicated blocks and large scripts, which can lead to programs that are difficult to understand. These ‘smells’ are caused by a lack of abstraction and decomposition in programs; skills that play a key role in computational thinking. In Scratch, repeats (loops), custom blocks (procedures) and clones (instances) can be used to correct these smells. Yet, custom blocks and clones are rarely taught to children under 11-years-old. We describe the design of a novel educational block-based programming game, Pirate Plunder, which aims to teach these skills to children aged 9-11. Players use Scratch blocks to navigate around a grid, collect items and interact with obstacles. Blocks are explained in ‘tutorials’; the player then completes a series of ‘challenges’ before attempting the next tutorial. A set of Scratch blocks, including repeats, custom blocks and clones, are introduced in a linear difficulty progression. There are two versions of Pirate Plunder; one that uses a debugging-first approach, where the player is given a program that is incomplete or incorrect, and one where each level begins with an empty program. The game design has been developed through iterative playtesting. The observations made during this process have influenced key design decisions such as Scratch integration, difficulty progression and reward system. In future, we will evaluate Pirate Plunder against a traditional Scratch curriculum and compare the debugging-first and non-debugging versions in a series of studies

Many Destinations, Many Pathways: A Quantitative Analysis of Legitimate Peripheral Participation in Scratch

Although informal online learning communities have proliferated over the last two decades, a fundamental question remains: What are the users of these communities expected to learn? Guided by the work of Etienne Wenger on communities of practice, we identify three distinct types of learning goals common to online informal learning communities: the development of domain skills, the development of identity as a community member, and the development of community-specific values and practices. Given these goals, what is the best way to support learning? Drawing from previous research in social computing, we ask how different types of legitimate peripheral participation by newcomers-contribution to core tasks, engagement with practice proxies, social bonding, and feedback exchange-may be associated with these three learning goals. Using data from the Scratch online community, we conduct a quantitative analysis to explore these questions. Our study contributes both theoretical insights and empirical evidence on how different types of learning occur in informal online environments

Computational thinking and online learning: A systematic literature review

This paper introduces research concerned with investigating how Computational Thinking and online learning can be successfully married to help empower secondary teachers to teach this subject. To aid this research, a systematic literature review was undertaken to investigate what is currently known in the academic literature on where Computational Thinking and online learning intersect. This paper presents the findings of this systematic literature review. It outlines the methodology used and presents the current data available in the literature on how Computational Thinking is taught online. Using a systematic process eight hundred articles were initially identified and then subsequently narrowed down to forty papers. These papers were analysed to answer the following two questions: 1. What are the current pedagogical approaches to teaching Computational Thinking online? 2. What were the categories of online learning observed in the teaching of Computational Thinking? Our findings show that a wide range of pedagogical approaches are used to teach Computational Thinking online, with the constructivist theory of learning being the most popular. The tools used to teach Computational Thinking were also varied, video game design, playing video games, competitions, and unplugged activities, to name a few. A significant finding was the dependency between the tool used and the definition of the term Computational Thinking. Computational Thinking lacks consensus on a definition, and thus the definition stated in the literature changed depending on the tool. By considering a significant body of research up to the present, our findings contribute to teachers, researchers and policy makers understanding of how computational thinking may be taught online at second level

Computational Thinking and Its Mathematics Origins through Purposeful Music Mixing with African American High School Students

Computational thinking (CT) is being advocated as core knowledge needed by all students—particularly, students from underrepresented groups—to prepare for the 21st century (Georgia Department of Education, 2017; Smith, 2016, 2017; The White House, 2017; Wing, 2006, 2014). The K–12 Computer Science Frameworks (2016), written by a national steering committee, defines CT as “the thought processes involved in expressing solutions as computational steps or algorithms that can be carried out by a computer” (p. 68). This project investigated current national introductory CT curricula and their related programming platforms used in high schools. In particular, the study documents the development, implementation, and quantitative outcomes of a purposeful introductory CT curriculum framed by an eclectic theoretical perspective (Stinson, 2009) that included culturally relevant pedagogy and critical play through a computational music remixing platform known as EarSketch. This purposeful introductory CT curriculum, designed toward engaging African American high school students, was implemented with a racially diverse set of high school students to quantitatively measure their engagement and CT content knowledge change. The goal of the project was to increase engagement and CT content knowledge of all student participants, acknowledging that what benefits African American students tends to benefit all students (Hilliard, 1992; Ladson-Billings, 2014). An analysis of the findings suggests that there was a significant increase in student cognitive engagement for racially diverse participants though not for the subset of African American students. Affective and conative engagement did not significantly change for racially diverse participants nor for the African American student subset. However, both the racially diverse set of students’ and their subset of African American students’ CT content knowledge significantly increased. As well, there was no significant difference between African American students and non-African American students post-survey engagement and CT content knowledge post-assessment means when adjusted for their pre-survey engagement and pre-assessment knowledge respectively. Hence, showing that purposeful music mixing using EarSketch designed toward African American students benefitted a racially diverse set of students in cognitive engagement and CT content knowledge and the African American subset of students in CT content knowledge. Implications and recommendations for further study are discussed

What You Know and What You Don\u27t Know: A Discussion of Knowledge Intensity and Support Architectures in Improving Crowdsourcing Creativity

Building on the componential theory of creativity, we studied how the crowdsourcing creativity support architectures and the task knowledge intensity levels affect the crowd’s creativity. Using an online experiment, we found that remixing can trigger the crowd to be more creative than external stimuli and using either architecture triggers the crowd to be more creative overall. Also, the crowd is more creative in solving low-knowledge-intensity tasks than in solving high-knowledge-intensity tasks. Interestingly, regardless of the knowledge intensity levels of tasks, crowdsourcing support architectures have a significant impact on the crowd’s creativity. Therefore, our paper contributes to the crowdsourcing literature on promoting crowd creativity and provides practical implications on solving societal challenges, especially large-scale problems

Reimagining Culture With Youth: Relationship and Representation in Culturally Centered Learning Environments

This dissertation intends to develop an understanding of how culturally centered learning environments impact youth’s relationship with culture. Working alongside a multicultural team of researchers, educators, and designers who came together with a shared goal of designing curricular activities to engage sixth graders with culture, I followed 12 sixth graders for a school year to understand their development of relationships with culture. I (re)conceptualize the holistic process of learning and engagement with culture as Ti-Wu and propose a cultural learning model that helps us understand how youth develop multiple relationships with culture. I further share how multimedia technology mediates youth’s relationship with culture through remixing and reimagining. This dissertation has implications for the ways in which we can (1) design a culturally centered learning environment to engage youth with culture and support the development of diverse relationships with culture, (2) develop youth’s relationship with culture through designing multimedia learning activities in formal learning environments, and (3) decenter Western-oriented research discourse on cultural learning and development

Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd to Address Societal Challenges: Revisiting the Knowledge Reuse for Innovation Process through Analytics

Societal challenges can be addressed not only by experts but also by crowds. Crowdsourcing provides a way to engage a crowd to contribute to the solutions of some of the biggest challenges of our era: how to cut our carbon footprint, how to address worldwide epidemic of chronic disease, and how to achieve sustainable development. Isolated crowd-based solutions in online communities are not always creative and innovative. Hence, remixing has been developed as a way to enable idea evolution and integration, and to harness reusable innovative solutions. Understanding the generativity of remixing is essential to leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to solve societal challenges. At its best, remixing can promote online community engagement, as well as support comprehensive and innovative solution generation. Organizers can maintain an active online community, community members can collectively innovate and learn, and, as a result, society can find new ways to solve important problems. We address what affects the generativity of a remix by revisiting the knowledge reuse for innovation process model. We analyze the reuse of proposals in Climate CoLab, an online innovation community that aims to address global climate change issues. Our application of several analytical methods to study factors that may contribute to the generativity of a remix reveals that remixes that include prevalent topics and integration metaknowledge are more generative. We conclude by suggesting strategies and tools that can help online communities better harness collective intelligence for addressing societal challenges

Coding as a Literacy Practice in Adult Learning Communities

This study considered how computing courses for adult learners might be customized to effectively address their reasons for learning to read and write computer code. The view of coding as a literacy practice is the key theme in this study. Street’s (2006) ideological model of literacy along with the perspective of computational participation, are theoretical models used to explore coding as a literacy practice (Kafai & Burke, 2017). Through the vehicle of action research, this study focused on analyzing the delivery of an introductory web languages coding course for female immigrants. This study drew from both the student and teacher perspectives. The study used student feedback collected from online class survey questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The study also incorporated the teacher’s field notes, a course summary report, and the Teaching Perspectives Inventory survey results (Collins & Pratt, 2011). Findings from this study include these areas of insights: 1) students’ views on the benefits of learning coding, 2) the language and communication challenges students faced, and 3) an overview of some effective teaching tools and approaches. Based on these findings, there is a discussion that considered possible issues related to student engagement in learning web language coding. Included are sections on implications for practice and future research

Occlusion: Creating Disorientation, Fugue, and Apophenia in an Art Game

Occlusion is a procedurally randomized interactive art experience which uses the motifs of repetition, isolation, incongruity and mutability to develop an experience of a Folie àDeux: a madness shared by two. It draws from traditional video game forms, development methods, and tools to situate itself in context with games as well as other forms of interactive digital media. In this way, Occlusion approaches the making of game-like media from the art criticism perspective of Materiality, and the written work accompanying the prototype discusses critical aesthetic concerns for Occlusion both as an art experience borrowing from games and as a text that can be academically understood in relation to other practices of media making. In addition to the produced software artifact and written analysis, this thesis includes primary research in the form of four interviews with artists, authors, game makers and game critics concerning Materiality and dissociative themes in game-like media. The written work first introduces Occlusion in context with other approaches to procedural remixing, Glitch Art, net.art, and analogue and digital collage and décollage, with special attention to recontextualization and apophenia. The experience, visual, and audio design approach of Occlusion is reviewed through a discussion of explicit design choices which define generative space. Development process, release process, post-release distribution, testing, and maintenance are reviewed, and the paper concludes with a description of future work and a post- mortem discussion. Included as appendices are a full specification document, script, and transcripts of all interviews

Coding by Choice: A Transitional Analysis of Social Participation Patterns and Programming Contributions in the Online Scratch Community

While massive online communities have drawn the attention of researchers and educators on their potential to support active collaborative work, knowledge sharing, and user-generated content, few studies examine participation in these communities at scale. The little research that does exist attends almost solely to adults rather than communities to support youths’ learning and identity development. In this chapter, we tackle two challenges related to understanding social practices that support learning in massive social networking forums where users engage in design. We examined a youth programmer community, called Scratch.mit.edu, that garners the voluntary participation of millions of young people worldwide. We report on site-wide distributions and patterns of participation that illuminate the relevance of different online social practices to ongoing involvement in the online community. Drawing on a random sample of more than 5000 active users of Scratch.mit.edu over a 3-month time period in early 2012, we examine log files that captured the frequency of three types of social practices that contribute to enduring participation: DIY participatory activities, socially supportive actions, and socially engaging interactions. Using latent transition analysis, we found (1) distinct patterns of participation (classes) across three time points (e.g., high networkers who are generally active, commenters who focus mainly on social participation, downloaders engaging in DIY participatory activities), (2) unique migration changes in class membership across time, (3) relatively equal gender representation across these classes, and (4) importance of membership length (or age) in terms of class memberships. In the discussion, we review our approach to analysis and outline implications for the design and study of online communities and tools for youth