Interactive design by children
Alexandria Killian Hansen, Hilary A. Dwyer, Charlotte Hill, Ashley Iveland, Timothy Martinez, Danielle B. Harlow, Diana M. Franklin · 2015
In this paper, we present our analysis of 92 fourth graders' digital story projects completed in LaPlaya, a Scratch-like programming environment. Projects were analyzed for the way that students programmed the start of the story, and if the program integrated user-centered design by providing instruction to the user on how to interact with the digital story. We found that fourth grade students rarely used user-centered design while creating digital stories in our block-based programming environment. Without explicit instruction, the demands of learning programming and simultaneously programming for an abstract user may be too cognitively demanding for the average fourth grader.