Lessons Learned from Designing a Programming System to Support Middle School Girls Creating Animated Stories

Traditional approaches to teaching computer science are often unsuccessful in attracting girls into the discipline. Our hypothesis is that presenting computer programming as a means to the end of storytelling will help motivate girls to learn to program, a traditional gateway to computer science. In this paper, we present a case study in designing a version of the Alice programming system to support storytelling. We present lessons we learned about what supports are necessary to enable girls to program animated movies and describe the kinds of programming tasks that arise in girls’ stories.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: VL
• Authors: Caitlin Kelleher, Randy Pausch
• Keywords: Languages, Programming, Traditional Approaches, Traditional Gateway, VL 2006