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Coding for Outdoor Play: a Coding Platform for Children to Invent and Enhance Outdoor Play Experiences

Published: 02 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Outdoor play is in decline, including its benefits to children's development. Coding, a typically indoor, screen-based activity, can potentially enrich outdoor play, serving as a rule-making medium. We present a coding platform that controls a programmable hardware device, enabling children to technologically-enhance their outdoor play experiences by inventing game ideas, coding them, and playing their games together with their friends. In the evaluation study, 24 children used the system to invent and play outdoor games. Results show children are able to bridge between the different domains of coding and outdoor play. They used the system to modify traditional games and invent new ones, enriching their outdoor experience. Children merged computational concepts with physical game elements, integrated physical outdoor properties as variables in their code, and were excited to see their code come to life. We conclude children can use coding to express their ideas by creating technologically-enhanced outdoor play experiences.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 2019
9077 pages
ISBN:9781450359702
DOI:10.1145/3290605
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part 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 components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 May 2019

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Author Tags

  1. children
  2. games/play
  3. outdoor play
  4. programming

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  • Scratch Foundation
  • I-CORE ISF

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CHI '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 703 of 2,958 submissions, 24%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)The Second Workshop on Child-Centered AI Design (CCAI)Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3636305(1-6)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2023)Play—An essential part of children’s lives and their computational empowermentFrontiers in Education10.3389/feduc.2022.10887167Online publication date: 21-Feb-2023
  • (2023)NaCanva: Exploring and Enabling the Nature-Inspired Creativity for ChildrenProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36042627:MHCI(1-25)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Exploring Computational Thinking with Physical Play through DesignProceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3585088.3589365(124-136)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
  • (2023)Child-Centred AI Design: Definition, Operation, and ConsiderationsExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3573821(1-6)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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  • (2022)Outside Where? A Survey of Climates and Built Environments in Studies of HCI outdoorsProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3507656(1-15)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
  • (2022)Application of the COM-B model to the correlates of children’s outdoor playing and the potential role of digital interventions: a systematic literature reviewChildren's Geographies10.1080/14733285.2022.207569221:3(442-458)Online publication date: 27-May-2022
  • (2021)DataMoves: Entangling Data and Movement to Support Computer Science EducationProceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3461778.3462039(2068-2082)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2021
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