Setting the scene: Scaffolding stories to benefit middle school students learning to program

Abstract

Research suggests that storytelling can motivate middle school students to explore computer programming. However, difficulties finding and realizing story ideas can decrease time actually spent on programming. In this paper, we present guidelines for constructing story scenes that reliably inspire ideas for novice programmers creating stories. To evaluate the impact of pre-built scenes with strategic design constraints on early programming behavior and attitudes, we conducted a between-subjects study comparing participants who used pre-built scenes and participants who crafted their own scenes. The results suggest that story starter scenes enable novice users to explore programming in the environment sooner, allow users to add and modify significantly more novel programming constructs during the length of the study, and maintain motivation for learning to program via storytelling.

Principles of a debugging-first puzzle game for computing education

“…We examined these participant-created levels, focusing particularly on the programming concepts used in the levels and the level's story, as storytelling elements in these environments are known to affect engagement [14,15].…”

How Mother and Father Support Affect Youths' Interest in Computer Science

“…Although research has demonstrated the effectiveness of a variety of strategies for increasing middle school-aged youths' understanding of CS concepts, the findings on increasing interest and attitudes towards CS have been mixed. There is some evidence to show that storytelling environments raised the interest of female middle schoolers in CS [23,24]. In our own research, we found that mentor relatability of near-peer mentors significantly predicted both self-efficacy and interest gains of middle school campers [7].…”

“…Middle school is the developmental level when youth start to make decisions about careers [9,13,20]. Consequently, research has shifted toward a focus on how to engage middle school students in CS by using programming environments that are more userfriendly and have the potential to lower the cognitive threshold for novice programmers, such as Scratch [16,34], Alice [23,24] and other similar programs. Overall, studies repeatedly found that environments like the ones mentioned above are effective in the acquisition of basic programming skills and concepts [25,26,34].…”

Floors and Flexibility

“…However, Kazakoff found that kindergarteners using ScratchJr in their classroom still spent a significant time using the environment's paint editor instead of programming [18]. Kerr provided pre-built scenes to students for creating digital stories and found that they used more constructs and methods, and spent twice as long modifying their programs as students who created all the scenes themselves [19]. The development environment itself plays a crucial role in guiding students to be developers rather than users.…”