The Craft of Code
Caelin Bryant, Jonathan Gilmour, Beatriz Herce-Hagiwara, Anh Thu Pham, Halle Remash, Marli Remash, Jonah Zimmerman, Sarah Dahlby Albright, Samuel A. Rebelsky · 2018
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/.