Saturday, August 09, 2008
I'm reading the PhD dissertation of Caitlin Kelleher, Motivating Programming: using storytelling to make computer programming attractive to middle school girls, and it's making me think a lot about teaching more intentionally toward the needs and characteristics of the population I work with--middle school girls. I think I already teach application skills and beginning programming with an approach that fosters curiosity, creativity, and risk taking. Kelleher's work shows that girls are much more motivated to tackle the logic and syntax problems of programming if the end result is a story they are telling. I've noticed that many girls will actually create a storytelling environment in which they build and program their Lego robots, and this becomes most fully developed and expressed when they videotape their robots and edit the short videos to share. One pair of girls even turned an assignment about making a switch-operated gate into a hilarious episode of "Pimp My Ride" in which the robotic gate played only a tiny part.
So this year I'll be trying out Storytelling Alice with my 7th graders, hopefully working with their English or writing teachers for content ideas. The idea behind the program is that students program already richly-developed 3D objects by dragging their attribute tiles into an editing space and creating new attributes for them. The illustrations I posted show you what it looks like. You don't see the commands for the spider to say "Boo!" in the code because the spider's entire jump procedure is created as a sub-procedure that isn't shown on that panel.