Engaging African American Elementary School Children in Code Understanding
Olivia M. Nche · 2019
This paper summarizes the results of a research project to broaden access to computing. The project is aimed at improving the attitudes and computational thinking skills for African American elementary school children in the 3rd to 5th grades and to understand their difficulties in reasoning about code. This was done within the context of a five-week summer camp. There were 40 children of whom about half were females. Along with instruction, we used a custom video game to teach code tracing. We used video game data and pre and posttests to assess students' performance. Qualitative and quantitative results from our mixed method design show cognitive and affective improvements as well as improvements in computational thinking skills. The data we collected also highlighted potential common mistakes that elementary school children might make as they attempt to reason about code. It shows the potential in games to motivate code understanding practice and improve learning. SIGCSE '19, February 27-March 2, 2019, Minneapolis, MN, USA © 2019 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5890-3/19/02. https://doi.org/10.1145/3287324.3293715