skip to main content
10.1145/3159450.3162321acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessigcseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
poster

The Craft of Code: Exposing Elementary Students to Computing Through Tangible Crafts (Abstract Only)

Published: 21 February 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Quick. Think of an outreach activity in computer science and a target audience. If you're like most people, you think of the target audience as middle-school students or high-school students and you think of activities like robotics, app development, or games. As a computer science educator, you might also note that these outreach activities should not just be designed to bring more people to CS, they should be designed to bring more people underrepresented in computing to CS-female students, domestic students of color, and lower-socio-economic-status students. But at the College level, what topics have shown the most efficacy in diversifying the discipline? It's not necessarily robotics, app development, or games. For example, the Media Computing project, led by Mark Guzdial, has shown the power of computing for the arts as a motivating factor for college-age female students. Can such an approach work for younger students? In this project, we developed and presented a week-long "craft of code" camp for elementary school students in which they used block-based languages to explore three kinds of creative computing, two of which had tangible output: programmable embroidery using TurtleStitch, programmable 3D models using BeetleBlocks, and programmable storytelling using Scratch. In this poster, we describe the curriculum for the camp, explore design issues, present results, and suggest approaches for others interested in developing similar camps. Our curriculum and materials are available at https://codecamp.sites.grinnell.edu/craftofcode/.

References

[1]
Anita DeWitt, Julia Fay, Madeleine Goldman, Eleanor Nicolson, Linda Oyolu, Lukas Resch, Jovan Martinez Saldaña, Soulideth Sounalath, Tyler Williams, Kathryn Yetter, Elizabeth Zak, Narren Brown, and Samuel A. Rebelsky. 2017. Arts Coding for Social Good: A Pilot Project for Middle-School Outreach. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 159--164.
[2]
Anita DeWitt, Julia Fay, Madeleine Goldman, Eleanor Nicolson, Linda Oyolu, Lukas Resch, Jovan Martinez Saldaña, Soulideth Sounalath, Tyler Williams, Kathryn Yetter, Elizabeth Zak, Narren Brown, and Samuel A. Rebelsky. 2017. What We Say vs. What They Do: A Comparison of Middle-School Coding Camps in the CS Education Literature and Mainstream Coding Camps (Abstract Only). In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 707--707.
[3]
Keith Kirkpatrick. 2016. Battling algorithmic bias: how do we ensure algorithms treat us fairly? Commun. ACM 59, 10 (September 2016), 16--17.
[4]
Monica M. McGill, Adrienne Decker, and Amber Settle. 2015. Does Outreach Impact Choices of Major for Underrepresented Undergraduate Students? In Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual International Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 71--80.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. The Craft of Code: Exposing Elementary Students to Computing Through Tangible Crafts (Abstract Only)

        Recommendations

        Comments

        Information & Contributors

        Information

        Published In

        cover image ACM Conferences
        SIGCSE '18: Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
        February 2018
        1174 pages
        ISBN:9781450351034
        DOI:10.1145/3159450
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

        Sponsors

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 21 February 2018

        Check for updates

        Author Tags

        1. 3d models
        2. beetleblocks
        3. block languages
        4. code camp
        5. elementary school
        6. embroidery
        7. outreach
        8. turtlestitch

        Qualifiers

        • Poster

        Funding Sources

        • Grinnell College Innovation Fund

        Conference

        SIGCSE '18
        Sponsor:

        Acceptance Rates

        SIGCSE '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 161 of 459 submissions, 35%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

        Upcoming Conference

        SIGCSE TS 2025
        The 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
        February 26 - March 1, 2025
        Pittsburgh , PA , USA

        Contributors

        Other Metrics

        Bibliometrics & Citations

        Bibliometrics

        Article Metrics

        • 0
          Total Citations
        • 0
          Total Downloads
        • Downloads (Last 12 months)0
        • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
        Reflects downloads up to 13 Feb 2025

        Other Metrics

        Citations

        Cited By

        View all

        View Options

        View options

        Figures

        Tables

        Media

        Share

        Share

        Share this Publication link

        Share on social media