Constructionist Gaming Beyond the Screen
Yasmin B. Kafai, Veena Vasudevan · 2015
Approaches to constructionist gaming---students making their own games for learning through programming---have mostly focused on screen designs. Hybrid crafting approaches that integrate crafts with digital components can extend game making beyond the screen and provide new opportunities for learning about computational concepts, skills, and perspectives. In this paper, we report on a series of workshops with middle school students (ages 11-14 years) who used Makey Makey, Play Doh, textiles and other materials to craft touchpads, augmented board games, and wearable controllers for their Scratch games. We examined students' approaches to computing and crafting in their onscreen and off screen designs. We discuss in which ways constructionist gaming can benefit from extending their designs into the physical world and what moving constructionist gaming beyond the screen has to offer for K-12 programming instruction.