This paper advances a collective research manifesto for Computational Empowerment (CE) in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI), grounded in diverse practices across global contexts. Drawing on five cases from Asia, Europe, and North America, we examine how CE commitments materialize in real world settings, revealing both their transformative potential and the tensions they introduce. Our cases illustrate that CE is inherently context dependent, socially situated, and shaped by surrounding structures. We identify key directions for extending CE: embedding critical and ethical perspectives, foregrounding situatedness and relationality, challenging convenient choices, and questioning design assumptions. This involves strengthening children’s agency in shaping computational systems and widening CE’s reach through more inclusive, sustainable practices. We offer this work as intentionally incomplete—an invitation to ongoing dialogue and collective action toward empowering children in computing.

The rising adoption of generative AI/ML technologies increases the need to support teens in developing AI/ML literacies. Child-computer interaction research argues that construction activities can support young people in understanding these systems and their implications. Recent exploratory studies demonstrate the feasibility of engaging teens in the construction of very small generative language models (LMs). However, it is unclear how constructing such models may foster the development of teens’ understanding of these systems from technical and socio-ethical perspectives. We conducted a week-long participatory design workshop in which sixteen teenagers constructed very small LMs to generate recipes, screenplays, and songs. Using thematic analysis, we identified technical and socio-ethical pieces of understandings that teens exhibited while designing generative LMs. This paper contributes (a) evidence of the kinds of pieces of understandings that teens have when constructing LMs and (b) a theory-backed framing to study novices’ understandings of AI/ML systems.

Despite growing calls to foster AI literacy, there are few available survey instruments designed for children and youth that study computational empowerment alongside construction and deconstruction activities. In such activities, learners’ beliefs about their abilities and attributes can impact their engagement. In this paper, we introduce and validate a survey instrument with constructs related to construction (creative expression and problem-solving self-beliefs) and deconstruction (auditing self-efficacy and fascination with auditing), along with more general self-beliefs related to design justice and the value of learning about AI/ML. We administered the instrument to 124 teenagers and assessed the six-factor structure of the instrument using confirmatory factor analysis. In addition to confirming the structure, we found that design justice beliefs strongly correlated with problem-solving, auditing self-efficacy, and creative expression.

While there is widespread interest in supporting young people to critically evaluate machine learning-powered systems, there is little research on how we can support them in inquiring about how these systems work and what their limitations and implications may be. Outside of K-12 education, an effective strategy in evaluating black-boxed systems is algorithm auditing—a method for understanding algorithmic systems’ opaque inner workings and external impacts from the outside in. In this paper, we review how expert researchers conduct algorithm audits and how end users engage in auditing practices to propose five steps that, when incorporated into learning activities, can support young people in auditing algorithms. We present a case study of a team of teenagers engaging with each step during an out-of-school workshop in which they audited peer-designed generative AI TikTok filters. We discuss the kind of scaffolds we provided to support youth in algorithm auditing and directions and challenges for integrating algorithm auditing into classroom activities. This paper contributes: (a) a conceptualization of five steps to scaffold algorithm auditing learning activities, and (b) examples of how youth engaged with each step during our pilot study.

The prominence of artificial intelligence and machine learning in everyday life has led to efforts to foster AI literacy for all K–12 students. In this paper, we review how Hour of Code activities engage with the five big ideas of AI, in particular with machine learning and societal impact. We found that a large majority of activities focus on perception and machine learning, with little attention paid to representation and other topics. A surprising finding was the increased attention paid to critical aspects of computing. However, we also observed a limited engagement with hands-on activities. In the discussion, we address how future introductory activities could be designed to offer a broader array of topics, including the development of tools to introduce novices to artificial intelligence and machine learning and the design of more unplugged and collaborative activities.

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and mixed reality (MR) increasingly pervade the world of children, from their schoolwork to leisure activities and social relationships. This has led to Child Computer Interaction (CCI) research supporting children's critical understanding of digital technologies and their ability to influence the design of future digital technologies. Despite these efforts, there are several limitations and challenges in terms of Computational Empowerment (CE) of children. This workshop unites such research 1) to create a shared manifesto for CE of children and 2) to jointly develop a research ‘roadmap’ to push the boundaries of CE of children.

As generative language models (GLMs) have gained popularity, youth are increasingly using them in their everyday lives.As such, most research has centered on supporting youth as users of GLMpowered systems.However, we know little of how to engage youth in the design of these models.Building on the rich legacy of childcomputer interaction research that positions youth as designers of computing systems, we explore how to support young people in designing GLMs.Through a case study of three teenagers (ages 14-15) building a babyGPT screenplay generator, we illustrate how the team developed a model while engaging in artificial intelligence/machine learning-relevant data practices and addressing ethical issues.This paper contributes a case study that demonstrates the feasibility of engaging youth in building GLMs.

Research on children and youth's participation in different roles in the design of technologies is one of the core contributions in child-computer interaction studies.Building on this work, we situate youth as advisors to a group of high school computer science teacher-and researcher-designers creating learning activities in the context of emerging technologies.Specifically, we explore algorithm auditing as a potential entry point for youth and adults to critically evaluate generative AI algorithmic systems, with the goal of designing classroom lessons.Through a two-hour session where three teenagers (16-18 years) served as advisors, we (1) examine the types of expertise the teens shared and (2) identify back stage design elements that fostered their agency and voice in this advisory role.Our discussion considers opportunities and challenges in situating youth as advisors, providing recommendations for actions that researchers, facilitators, and teachers can take to make this unusual arrangement feasible and productive.

This study investigates how high school-aged youth engage in algorithm auditing to identify and understand biases in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) tools they encounter daily. With AI/ML technologies being increasingly integrated into young people's lives, there is an urgent need to equip teenagers with AI literacies that build both technical knowledge and awareness of social impacts. Algorithm audits (also called AI audits) have traditionally been employed by experts to assess potential harmful biases, but recent research suggests that non-expert users can also participate productively in auditing. We conducted a two-week participatory design workshop with 14 teenagers (ages 14-15), where they audited the generative AI model behind TikTok's Effect House, a tool for creating interactive TikTok filters. We present a case study describing how teenagers approached the audit, from deciding what to audit to analyzing data using diverse strategies and communicating their results. Our findings show that participants were engaged and creative throughout the activities, independently raising and exploring new considerations, such as age-related biases, that are uncommon in professional audits. We drew on our expertise in algorithm auditing to triangulate their findings as a way to examine if the workshop supported participants to reach coherent conclusions in their audit. Although the resulting number of changes in race, gender, and age representation uncovered by the teens were slightly different from ours, we reached similar conclusions. This study highlights the potential for auditing to inspire learning activities to foster AI literacies, empower teenagers to critically examine AI systems, and contribute fresh perspectives to the study of algorithmic harms.

As artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) applications become more pervasive in youth lives, supporting them to interact, design, and evaluate applications is crucial. This paper positions youth as auditors of their peers’ ML-powered applications to better understand algorithmic systems’ opaque inner workings and external impacts. In a two-week workshop, 13 youth (ages 14-15) designed and audited ML-powered applications. We analyzed pre/post clinical interviews in which youth were presented with auditing tasks. The analyses show that after the workshop all youth identified algorithmic biases and inferred dataset and model design issues. Youth also discussed algorithmic justice issues and ML model improvements. Furthermore, youth reflected that auditing provided them new perspectives on model functionality and ideas to improve their own models. This work contributes (1) a conceptualization of algorithm auditing for youth; and (2) empirical evidence of the potential benefits of auditing. We discuss potential uses of algorithm auditing in learning and child-computer interaction research.

Even as efforts to promote K-12 CS education forge ahead, there is a growing consensus that students must also be taught artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in order to be prepared for the fast-changing world powered by AI/ML. How can ensure that we leverage learnings from two decades of CS education research and practice, and build on successes while mitigating missteps? This panel invites researchers with deep expertise in 'CSForAll' efforts for a timely discussion and sharing of valuable lessons from CS education efforts about pedagogies, attention to equity, and teacher preparation that will also benefit K-12 AI education.

Debugging physical computing projects provides a rich context to understand cross-disciplinary problem solving that integrates multiple domains of computing and engineering. Yet understanding and assessing students' learning of debugging remains a challenge, particularly in understudied areas such as physical computing, since finding and fixing hardware and software bugs is a deeply contextual practice. In this paper we draw on the rich history of clinical interviews to develop and pilot "failure artifact scenarios" in order to study changes in students' approaches to debugging and troubleshooting electronic textiles (e-textiles). We applied this clinical interview protocol before and after an eight-week-long e-textiles unit. We analyzed pre/post clinical interviews from 18 students at four different schools. The analysis revealed that students improved in identifying bugs with greater specificity, and across domains, and in considering multiple causes for bugs. We discuss implications for developing tools to assess students' debugging abilities through contextualized debugging scenarios in physical computing.

Most attention in K-12 artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) education has been given to having youths train models, with much less attention to the equally important testing of models when creating machine learning applications. Testing ML applications allows for the evaluation of models against predictions and can help creators of applications identify and address failure and edge cases that could negatively impact user experiences. We investigate how testing each other's projects supported youths to take perspective about functionality, performance, and potential issues in their own projects. We analyzed testing worksheets, audio and video recordings collected during a two week workshop in which 11 high school youths created physical computing projects that included (audio, pose, and image) ML classifiers. We found that through peer-testing youths reflected on the size of their training datasets, the diversity of their training data, the design of their classes and the contexts in which they produced training data. We discuss future directions for research on peer-testing in AI/ML education and current limitations for these kinds of activities.

In this paper, we examine a co-design workshop in which youth redesigned a learning activity for critical engagement with computing for the Hour of Code, an annual event that offers hour-long introductory computing activities to youth. We conducted co-design workshops during summer 2021 in two cities with 12 youth of Color (ages 11-15 years), in which we employed different reflective, collaborative and making activities to investigate youths’ critical perceptions of computing and address the following research questions: (1) What are the perspectives of youth from groups historically marginalized in computing on critical issues in computing? (2) What kinds of projects do youth create in Scratch to address critical issues in computing? and (3) How do youth reflect on the learning activity and make changes to implement it with their peers? In the discussion, we address what we learned about co-designing a critical computing learning activity with youth.

In K-12 education, nearly all efforts focused on expanding computer science education center on the induction of new computer science teachers, with very little attention given to support the ongoing needs of experienced computer science teachers. More seasoned teachers benefit from deepening their content knowledge, pedagogical practices, and knowledge and capacity to provide equitable and inclusive learning experiences that results in students feeling a sense of belonging in computer science. This panel will discuss the needs of experienced CS teachers from a variety of perspectives, including teacher education researchers, professional development leaders, and high school practitioners and teacher facilitators. The panel will collectively outline a research and practice agenda that focuses on supporting, retaining, and further developing experienced teachers through expanded professional development, leadership opportunities, and community for CS teachers.

As one of the largest initiatives to introduce K-12 youth to computing, the Hour of Code has reached hundreds of millions of students around the globe. While Hour of Code activities have been immensely successful, they have also been criticized for their focus on puzzle-like close-ended guided activities leaving out more creative and critical engagement with computing. In this paper, we report on efforts to design CodeQuilt, an Hour-of-Code-style activity in which middle and high school youth were asked to design Scratch projects that engage with issues on who and what is computing. We analyzed over 100 Scratch projects posted on the public CodeQuilt site in addition to reflective responses provided by participating youth. We found that a wide array of Scratch projects engaged creatively by integrating popular media but only a small number of projects focused on critical issues. In the discussion, we outline next steps for better supporting more critical and creative engagement with computing in Hour of Code activities.

In this paper, we share the design of a virtual epidemic with recognizable similarities to the real-life COVID-19 pandemic in order to engage children and youth in seeking information about the outbreak and practicing usage of personal protection equipment. In our research we sought to create a safe space in the virtual world, Whyville, for youth to “play” with serious topics of infection, asymptomatic disease transmission, prevention measures, and research and reporting of public health information. We examined the logfiles of 1,022 youth aged 10-18 years (mean = 13.7 years) who participated in an outbreak of a virtual virus, SPIKEY-20, in October and November 2020. Analyzing log files, we found that player engagement in productive infectious disease practices increased, including information seeking as well as purchases and usage of personal protective equipment during the virtual epidemic. In the discussion, we address the potential for virtual epidemics to provide a safe, playful space to practice and learn how to productively confront infectious disease and build promising connections between virtual and real-life epidemics.

Notional machines i.e. pedagogical devices to communicate program execution play a key role in computing classrooms, especially within introductory settings [2, 5]. From machine-generated representations to classroom learning activities, a variety of notional machines have been examined in the field of computing education research. A more recent review [2] has also noted the adoption of multiple notional machines by instructors during a course or a unit to communicate a family of interconnected, computing concepts within a learning context.

Comprehending programs is key to learning programming. Previous studies highlight novices' naive approaches to comprehending the structural, functional, and behavioral aspects of programs. And yet, with the majority of them examining on-screen programming environments, we barely know about program comprehension within physical computing-a common K-12 programming context. In this study, we qualitatively analyzed think-aloud interview videos of 22 high school students individually comprehending a given text-based Arduino program while interacting with its corresponding functional physical artifact to answer two questions: 1) How do novices comprehend the given text-based Arduino program? And, 2) What role does the physical artifact play in program comprehension? We found that novices mostly approached the program bottom-up, initially comprehending structural and later functional aspects, along different granularities. The artifact provided two distinct modes of engagement, active and interactive, that supported the program's structural and functional comprehension. However, behavioral comprehension i.e. understanding program execution leading to the observed outcome was inaccessible to many. Our findings extend program comprehension literature in two ways: (a) it provides one of the very few accounts of high school students' code comprehension in a physical computing context, and, (b) it highlights the mediating role of physical artifacts in program comprehension. Further, they point directions for future pedagogical and tool designs within physical computing to better support students' distributed program comprehension.

As computer science is moving into K-12 education, most efforts have focused on getting new teachers into computer science or integrating computing within STEM topics. But one aspect that has received less attention, if any, is the continued professional development of experienced CS teachers. We know little about the particular learning needs of experienced CS teachers, knowledge that will be critical as the CS teaching force expands significantly in coming years. In this panel, we address this knowledge gap from the perspective of teacher education research and professional development-what we need to know about deepening teachers' pedagogical practices and content knowledge-an understanding that will be instrumental for retaining and enriching teachers in CS education.

Electronic textiles, which integrate computation with fabrics through a redesigned interface of microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators, have expanded possibilities not only for engineering, fashion, and human-computer interaction but also for computer science education itself. While individual studies involving electronic textiles have shown promise to diversify participation, raise interest, and deepen learning in computing, especially for female students, we recognized a need to synthesize findings across studies to understand the overall contribution of electronic textiles to computing education. In this article, we report our findings from a meta-synthesis of 64 educational electronic textiles studies to answer the following questions in computing: (1) Did electronic textiles broaden access and participation? (2) How did electronic textiles support learners’ interests and sustain participation? (3) What and how did students learn from electronic textile projects? Our meta-synthesis revealed that although electronic textiles successfully broadened access, supported learners’ interests, and introduced basic computational concepts to novice learners, questions around equitable participation and deeper disciplinary engagement persist. We discuss directions for future design and research efforts to explore the full potential of e-textiles in computer science education.

The increased interest in promoting CS education for all has been coalescing around the idea of "computational thinking." Several framings for promoting computational thinking in K-12 education have been proposed by practitioners and researchers that each place different emphases on either (1) skill and competence building, (2) creative expression and participation, or (3) social justice and ethics. We review each framing and how the framings structure the theory space of computational thinking. We then discuss how CS education can leverage the explanatory potential that each framing offers to the implementation and evaluation of learning, teaching, and tools in computing education. Our goal is to help CS education researchers, teachers, and designers unpack and leverage the complexities of this theory space (rather than ignoring it) while also addressing broader educational concerns regarding diversity, providing new directions for how students and teachers can actively participate in designing their digital futures, and directing current computing education efforts towards a more humanistic orientation.

Just over a decade ago, various electronic textile construction kits have emerged with Arduino-based microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators that can be sewn together with conductive thread to create wearables augmented with new functionalities. These kits were designed to broaden participation in and perspectives about computing along with introducing learners to powerful ideas about circuitry and coding. In this paper, we synthesize 46 studies that have introduced crafts, circuitry, and coding concepts with e-textiles in K-16 education. We found that e-textiles have been successful in broadening participation and increasing interest in computing for many youth and adults, especially from underrepresented groups, inside and outside of school. While the e-textiles construction kits have been successful in deepening learning of circuitry concepts, learning of computer science, especially advanced concepts, has been far less attended to with the exception of projects designed by undergraduate students with already significant disciplinary expertise. In the discussion, we suggest directions for future research such as bringing more computing into e-textile designs, creating assessments to capture coding and circuitry learning, and developing models for more advanced projects to leverage the potential of e-textiles for computer science education.

The links between music and computation date back at least three decades. This trend has led to the development of learning environments for novices to make music and learn computational concepts. However, research connecting music and computation is mostly situated within the context of on-screen programming, with little research involving hybrid, tangible environments. Electronic textiles (e-textiles) is one such hybrid context where learners craft interactive physical artifacts by sewing microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators onto toys, clothes, or other fabric accessories. Prior studies show that Arduino-based e-textiles afford opportunities for students to learn basic concepts such as variables and control flow but not more advanced concepts such as arrays and for loops. In our study, we expand learning with e-textiles as learners compose and code music to address the following research question: What are the affordances of designing musical wearables to deepen computational conceptual learning? We present a case study of a group of four 15-17-year-old youth and an adult co-making a musical wearable-JazzHands-a glove augmented with actuators such as LEDs and speaker, and motion, touch, and light sensors. We analyzed videos of the group's collaborative design sessions, student daily journals, multiple versions of the code, and post-workshop, artifact-based interviews with the youth. Our analysis revealed that making musical wearables not only allowed the youth to express themselves and relate to computing as a creative endeavor but also afforded unique opportunities to work with constructs such as arrays indices, sensor data integration, and logical expressions to control for loops.

Computational thinking has become the calling card for re-introducing coding into schools. While much attention has focused on how students engage in designing systems, applications, and other computational artifacts as a measure of success for computational thinking, far fewer efforts have focused on what goes into remediating problems in designing systems and interactions because learners invariably make mistakes that need fixing-or debugging. In this panel, we examine the often overlooked practice of debugging that presents significant learning challenges (and opportunities) to students in completing assignments and instructional challenges to teachers in helping students to succeed in their classrooms. The panel participants will review what we know and don't know about debugging, discuss ways to conceptualize and study debugging, and present instructional approaches for helping teachers and students to engage productively in debugging situations.

Many efforts of curricula design have concentrated on expanding participation in K-12 CS education by introducing innovative approaches but few have focused on addressing longstanding equity issues through their choices of culturally relevant materials and activities. In this paper, we describe our efforts in using electronic textiles which include Arduino-based microcontrollers that are sewn with conductive thread on fabrics to connect actuators and sensors and create interactive wearables. We report on the implementation of an electronic textiles curricular unit in the Exploring Computer Science introductory computing course in 13 high schools involving 272 high school students largely from underrepresented groups in a major metropolitan school district. We examined two issues relevant to broadening equitable participation in CS: (1) students' changed perceptions of computing, and (2) students' depth of learning of computing, circuitry and crafting in the final project. Pre/post surveys on students' perceptions of computing showed positive, significant gains in students' self-confidence in solving CS problems, fascination with computing and ability to be creative with computing. Teacher evaluations of students' final projects revealed robust learning in the areas of basic programming and computational circuitry as well as strong learning across more challenging computational concepts, with room for growth. We discuss factors that impacted student outcomes and outline steps for further analysis.

The fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), computer gaming and activities with digital technologies associated with the Maker movement are still dominated by a rather homogeneous group of (mostly white male) people though there are numerous initiatives and research attempting to change this. With this workshop we aim to bring together researchers, designers, educators and practitioners in IDC to share experience and explore how we can shape and create (learning) environments and tools to sustainably engage girls of diverse backgrounds and all ages in STEM, gaming and Making.

How can we design for more active participation and engagement in massive online virtual worlds? While many online communities, be they online games or virtual worlds, have been created or used ostensibly with learning goals in mind, relatively little has been studied about how to motivate members collectively (rather than individually or in small groups) in productive activities, especially with children and teens. To this end we describe the design and impact of a virtual epidemic in a massive online community called Whyville.net that engaged youth players in an infectious disease outbreak. Our analyses of click data captured in log files and observations reveal which factors impacted players' changes in participation, including searches for information, engagement in prevention, and donations to vaccine design. In the discussion, we address what we have learned about identity, agency and timing as levers in designing participation in massive community experiences.

We report on the development and implementation of biomakerlab, a wetlab starter kit for synthetic biology activities in K-12. In synthetic biology, participants make their own DNA-gene by gene-and then grow their designs into real applications by inserting them into microorganisms to develop different traits and characteristics provided by the genes. High school students worked with biomakerlab to make logo designs using microorganisms they manipulated to produce differently colored pigments. Our analysis focuses on student engagement with production activities and design challenges in biomaking. In the discussion, we address differences and overlaps between traditional maker activities and biomaker activities for education.

Most of the previous research has focused on gendered or racial representations in either game playing or making contexts. In this paper, we adopt an intersectional perspective by examining gender and race identity representations and constructions within Minecraft, a sandbox game, popular with millions of youth. Our research focuses not only on game play and construction but also examines gender and racial representations within the larger metagaming community, in particular online YouTube video postings and a public gaming convention. In the discussion, we address gender, race, and intersectional identity representation across Minecraft's ecology in how these representations on and offline are influenced by and impact youth gamers along with ways to prevent Minecraft from becoming an exclusionary space.

In this paper, we report on the study of a new virtual epidemic called the Dragon Swooping Cough, a newly designed virus unleashed on the youth virtual world of Whyville.net in two stages during December 2015 and April 2016. Our overall goal in this study was to design experiential learning of infectious disease in a safe but epidemiologically and educationally sound way. The virtual virus targeted personal, social, and economic aspects of online life in Whyville in order to mirror real-world viruses and to trigger player emotions. Our analysis of pre/post surveys and online behavior log files for survey (N = 747) and non-survey (N = 3348) participants revealed that the virtual epidemic promoted participation, primarily through engagement in prevention against the virtual virus, that increased in the second outbreak. Furthermore, emotional engagement played an intriguing role in both behavioral and information-seeking behaviors. In the discussion we address what we learned about opportunities and challenges in designing a virtual epidemic for educational engagement.

In this paper, we examine students? learning about computing by designing, coding, and remixing electronic textiles with sensor inputs and light outputs. We conducted a workshop with 23 high school students ages 16-17 years who learned how to craft and code circuits with the LilyPad Arduino, an electronic textile construction kit. Our analyses not only confirm significant increases in students' understanding of functional circuits but also showcase students' ability in reading, remixing and writing program code for controlling circuits. In our discussion, we address opportunities and challenges of introducing codeable circuit design for integrating maker activities that include engineering and computing into K-12 classrooms.

Most research in primary and secondary computing education has focused on understanding learners within formal classroom communities, leaving aside the growing number of promising informal online programming communities where young users contribute, comment, and collaborate on programs to facilitate learning. In this article, we examined trends in computational participation in Scratch, an online community with over 1 million registered youth designers. Drawing on a random sample of 5,004 youth programmers and their activities over 3 months in early 2012, we examined programming concepts used in projects in relation to level of participation, gender, and length of membership of Scratch programmers. Latent class analysis results identified the same four groups of programmers in each month based on the usage of different programming concepts and showed how membership in these groups shifted in different ways across time. Strikingly, the largest group of project creators (named Loops) used the simplest and fewest programming concepts. Further, this group was the most stable in membership and was disproportionately female. In contrast, the more complex programming groups (named Variables, Low Booleans, and High Booleans) showed much movement across time. Further, the Low Booleans and High Booleans groups, the only groups to use “and,” “or,” and “not” statements in their programs, were disproportionately male. In the discussion, we address the challenges of analyzing young learners’ programming in informal online communities and opportunities for designing more equitable computational participation.

Much attention has focused on the lack of diversity in access and participation in digital media available to youth. Far less attention has been paid to the diversity of youth creators and the content that is produced by youth. We examined the diversity of project creators, content, and comments in one of the largest youth programming sites called Scratch (scratch.mit.edu), with over 7 million registered members between ages 6-16, over 10 million posted projects and 16 million comments. We used keyword and webcrawler searches to reveal that only a small number of users (<.01%) self-disclosed their racial and ethnic identities. Case studies further illuminated how project designs and comments delved into race, provided cultural critique or addressed racial harassment. In the discussion, we address these blind spots of diversity in massive online DIY youth communities, discuss methodological limitations, and provide recommendations for future directions in supporting diversity.

Millions of kids are visiting and communicating in online sites and communities. While some concerns have been raised unsupervised and potentially harmful communication, a number of studies have identified great potential in kids' online talk, especially when related to feedback on user-generated content. Yet little research has been done at scale to show whether or not positive communication practices are broadly engaged in or supported online. This paper focuses on the informal peer support present in the online Scratch community, a youth programming site. Drawing on a random sample of 8,000 comments from over 5,000 random participants on the Scratch website gathered from January to March 2012, our analysis focuses on the quality of comments about projects and identifies their constructive, emotional and functional foci In the discussion, we address what these findings tell us about productive participation, potential for future research, and opportunities for scaffolding broader and richer participation.

Most research on game making activities for learning has focused on programming screen-based designs. Only recently has research begun to include the design of tangible interfaces; connecting on-screen programming with hands-on crafting. In this paper, we examine the potential of a workshop that combines the high and low of technology with game design in which teams of high school youth crafted, coded and collaborated on their own augmented board games to highlight intersections between learning programming and making, and creating across digital and tangible modalities. We focused our analysis of students' projects, interactions, and reflections on how young designers conceptualized the integration of screen and board game elements, realized computational concepts and practices in their board game designs and augmentations, and reflected on their game design experience connecting crafting and coding. In the discussion, we review how the expansion of game making activities can create new opportunities for interaction design and research.

Most research on game making has focused on designing digital games, as opposed to incorporating the potential for the designs of peripherals and controllers. In this paper, we illustrate how youth created wearable and physically interactive controllers by combining digital and tangible construction kits: Scratch, ModKit, the MaKey MaKey, and the Lilypad Arduino. In an eight-session workshop, 14-15-year old youth coded and created their own Scratch games and created wearable or electronic textile-based bidirectionally responsive game controllers using sensors to activate a response on the screen, through the physical artifact, or both interfaces. We analyzed students' design of game controllers, as well as post-workshop interviews, to understand how they articulated an understanding of bidirectionally responsive design and its affordances, focusing on a case study. In the discussion we address some of the insights and challenges presented through the workshop, and offer suggestions for future work.

Most approaches to constructionist gaming---students making their own games for learning ---have 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 creative expression and learning. In this paper, we report on a workshop with middle school youth (ages 11-13 years) who were using MaKey MaKey, textiles and other conductive materials to sew and glue together wearable game controllers to play their own remixed flappy bird games in Scratch. We examined students' approaches to computing and crafting their onscreen and offscreen designs using Papert's concept of syntonicity that emphasizes resonance across multiple dimensions with children's interests. Finally, we discuss in which ways constructionist gaming can benefit from extending their designs into the physical world.

We draw attention to the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender in computing education by examining the experiences of ten American Indian boys (12-14 years old) who participated in introductory computing activities with electronic textiles. To date, the use of electronic textiles (e-textiles) materials in introductory computing activities have been shown to be particularly appealing to girls and women because they combine craft, circuitry, and computing. We hypothesized that e-textiles would be appealing to American Indian boys because of a strong community-based craft tradition linked to heritage cultural practices. In order to understand boys' perspectives on learning computing through making culturally-relevant e-textiles artifacts, we analyzed boys' completed artifacts as documented in photographs and code screenshots, their design practices as documented in daily field notes and video logs of classroom sessions, and their reflections from interviews guided by the following research questions: (1) How did American Indian boys initially engage with e-textiles materials? (2) How did boys? computational perspectives develop through the process of making and programming their own e-textiles artifacts? Our findings highlight the importance of connecting to larger community value systems as a context for doing computing, the importance of allowing space for youth to make decisions within the constraints of the design task, and the value of tangible e-textiles artifacts in providing linkages between home and school spaces. We connect our work to other efforts to engage racial and ethnic minority students in computing and discuss the implications of our work for computer science educators designing computing curricula for increasingly diverse groups of students, especially as pertains to the emerging field of culturally responsive computing.

We describe a workshop for high school youth to create interactive responsive and wearable interfaces for computing and gaming. The tools used in the workshop included tangible construction toolkits (the Lilypad Arduino and the MaKeyMaKey) and visual programming languages (Scratch, a coding and game design environment, and ModKit, a visual programming kit for Arduino devices and similar tangible kits) in addition to various conductive materials such as special fabric and aluminum foil. Past efforts with each of these toolkits have focused on interaction in one direction. This workshop focused on creating bidirectional tangible interfaces for gaming, meaning that interaction would happen on the screen and in the physical artifact or controller simultaneously. A further feature was the focus on creating wearable games. Thirteen students ages 13-15 years participated in the eight-session workshop. After learning the tools during the first four sessions, they started designing their own projects. Student teams created one bidirectional game with a textile interface, three inventive uni-directional wearable games and interfaces, and one half-completed design. Students felt that the workshop provided them with multiple entry points to computing, by capitalizing on different skill sets, and many expressed understanding bidirectional design, though they felt they needed more time. This poster will discuss the affordances and constraints of the workshop activities and toolkits, and how projects created relate to the students' understanding of tangible computing with different kinds of responsiveness. Finally, we offer recommendations for future workshops based on our own redesign of activities.

While coding competitions and hackathons have steadily increased in number, few women participate. Because these public events present viable opportunities to broaden participation in computing, we designed the theme to focus on "Wear & Care" and collaborative arrangements in a hardware hackathon, called StitchFest, in which 33 undergraduate and graduate students used the LilyPad Arduino to design wearables. Our analysis focused on the interviews conducted with eight female and seven male college participants to understand how targeted recruitment, thematic framing, space arrangements, kinds of materials and material distribution impacted participation and perception. We discuss what we learned about setting a thematic focus and fostering collaborative learning in coding competitions for broadening participation in computing.

Connected Messages brings together traditions of engaging youth in designing interactive murals with themes relevant to their lives and new lowcost networking technologies of connecting local groups with global audiences. We describe the design of a community mural that functions like a public display, which can be remotely programmed through an online interface. The implementation with Maker Mentors in five Free Library branches with over 1,000 youth focused on different aspects of youth maker agency in accessing, participating, and expressing their ideas. In the discussion, we review key dimensions expanding youth and Maker Mentor participation in communityrelevant designs.

More than twenty years ago, Turkle and Papert wrote about the lack of epistemological pluralism in computing and the resulting exclusivity in the field. Although research on what constitutes a personal epistemology has expanded since then, students continue to hold narrow views of computing that are disconnected from the field at large. To align with current research, we use the term "views" to encompass students' expectations of, attitudes towards, and beliefs about computing. We took a crafts-oriented approach to expanding students' views of computing and broadening participation in computer science by engaging high school students in a 10-week electronic textiles unit. Students were introduced to computational concepts and practices as they designed and programmed electronic artifacts. We found their views shifted from pre- to post-interviews in ways that allowed them to see computing as accessible, transparent, personal, and creative. We discuss how e-textiles materials and the design of classroom activities brought back a diversity of ways thinking about who can do computing, how to do it, and what computing can be.

There have been many efforts to increase access and participation of indigenous communities in computer science education using ethnocomputing. In this paper, we extend culturally responsive computing by using electronic textiles that leverage traditional crafting and sewing practices to help students learn about engineering and computing as they also engage with local indigenous knowledges. Electronic textiles include sewable microcontrollers that can be connected to sensors and actuators by stitching circuits with conductive thread. We present findings from a junior high Native Arts class and an academically-oriented summer camp in which Native American youth ages 12-15 years created individual and collective e-textile designs using the LilyPad Arduino. In our discussion we address how a culturally responsive open design approach to ethnocomputing with e-textile activities can provide a productive but also challenging context for design agency and cultural connections for American Indian youth, and how these findings can inform the design of a broader range of introductory computational activities for all.

In this article, we examine the use of electronic textiles (e-textiles) for introducing key computational concepts and practices while broadening perceptions about computing. The starting point of our work was the design and implementation of a curriculum module using the LilyPad Arduino in a pre-AP high school computer science class. To understand students’ learning, we analyzed the structure and functionality of their circuits and program code as well as their design approaches to making and debugging their e-textile creations and their views of computing. We also studied students’ changing perceptions of computing. Our discussion addresses the need for and design of scaffolded challenges and the potential for using crafts materials and activities such as e-textiles for designing introductory courses that can broaden participation in computing.

The recent development of low cost tangible construction kits has lowered the barriers to entry for amateur and youth hardware designers. In this paper, we discuss the outcomes of a pilot study in which middle school youths set up a game arcade by remixing Scratch games and crafting physical game controllers using the MaKey MaKey and Play-Doh. The analyses focused on the youths' designs and reflections on Scratch remixes, their game controllers, and the culminating arcade. Designing game controllers and setting up the arcade was a productive learning experience for the youths in which they were able to glean insights about how to improve their designs by watching younger students play their games. In the discussion we highlight the parts of the workshop that were most successful, address what we learned about the youths' experiences, develop suggestions for the design of future workshops, and discuss the significance of authentic audience designs.

In this conceptual paper, we argue that recent developments in K-12 programming education are suggestive of what can be called a "social turn", a shift in the field in which learning to code has shifted from being a predominantly individualistic and tool-oriented approach to now one that is decidedly sociologically and culturally grounded in the creation and sharing of digital media. We discuss in detail three dimensions of this social turn (1) from writing code to creating applications, (2) from composing "from scratch" to remixing the work of others, and (3) from designing tools to facilitating communities. These three shifts illustrate how the development of artifacts, tools, and communities of programming lead us to move from computational thinking to computational participation. We draw from examples of past and current research, both inside and outside of school, and situate these developments in the context of current discussions around computational thinking, which has become a driving force in revitalizing programming in K-12 curricula and altogether broadening participation in computing.

This study reports on the design, implementation, and evaluation of a service-learning course based on a "cascading mentoring" model linking together the faculty, administration, and undergraduates of an urban university's computer science department with local high school students. We present findings from surveys and post-interviews that illustrate undergraduates' and high school students' experiences in the program and how their perceptions of computing and mentoring changed based upon the outreach. In our discussion, we focus on the institutional and conceptual challenges of implementing the community service course within the university's computer science department, while also highlighting the learning opportunities for streamlining such a model for future iterations.

In this paper, we present and discuss the use of electronic textiles (e-textiles) for introducing key computational concepts and practices and broadening participation and perceptions about computing. The starting point of our work was the design and implementation of a curriculum module using the Lilypad Arduino in a pre-AP high school class. To understand students' learning of concepts, practices, and perceptions of computing, we focused on the structure and functionality of circuits and program code and their design approaches to making and debugging their e-textile creations, and on their views on computing by examining pre-post interviews. Our discussion addresses the challenges and potential of using e-textiles materials and activities for designing introductory courses that can reach a broader student population.

Though recent efforts have focused on creating tools and communities for youth game designers, the emergence of online competitions is a recent phenomenon in engaging students in such activities. In this paper we describe and analyze how a class of middle-school students participated in a national STEM video game challenge. Using Scratch, students designed, debugged and submitted their own video games over a three-month period. In analyzing the game designs, we paid particular attention to the role different authentic audiences and what we learned about supporting participation in online competitions.

In this paper, we investigate the support of online creative collaborations among young programmers in Scratch. We designed and implemented two online collaboration events, the Collab Challenge and Collab Camp, implemented in January 2011 and in August 2011, respectively, in which members of the Scratch community were invited to work together on programming projects. This paper explores what we learned from iteratively designing and implementing the second event Collab Camp. In our analyses, we reflect on how the changes in context of collaboration (context), the opportunities for finding collaborators (connection), and the engagement of members in constructive feedback (critique) emerged as critical spaces supportive of online collaboration. We discuss how these spaces can serve as guiding principles for online communities that support young designers in creating expressive and personally meaningful projects together.

In this paper we propose a multimodal approach to log file data analysis to develop a better understanding of player participation and practices in virtual worlds. To deal with the massive amounts of data collected via log files researchers traditionally have employed quantitative reduction techniques for revealing trends and patterns. We contend that certain qualitative analysis techniques can reveal particular play practices across online and offline spaces and aspects of individual players' participation invisible through other methods. We present examples from our research in the tween virtual world Whyville.net that illustrate the uses of these new techniques. In the discussion we address the benefits and limitations of our approach.

This study investigates the potential to introduce basic programming concepts to middle school children within the context of a classroom writing-workshop. In this paper we describe how students drafted, revised, and published their own digital stories using the introductory programming language Scratch and in the process learned fundamental CS concepts as well as the wider connection between programming and writing as interrelated processes of composition.

Community service courses are often where undergraduates make connections between academic content and practical computer science applications, build bridges between the university and the community, and ultimately increase access to technology in such communities. In this poster we report on our efforts-supported by a NSF Broadening Participation in Computing grant-to design, implement, and evaluate a service-learning course based on a "cascading mentoring" model linking together the faculty, administration, and undergraduates of an urban university's computer science department with area high school students. The poster presents the cascading model and through a series of post-interviews offers preliminary data charting undergraduates' experiences as both mentees and mentors.

One challenge in assessing students' engineering and programming designs is that the problems are difficult to evaluate with pencil and paper. Projects with multiple types of designs (circuitry, coding, aesthetics) can go wrong in many ways (Resnick, Berg, & Eisenberg, 2000). Identifying, debugging, and solving these problems is at the crux of being able to design computational and material projects. In this poster we analyze high school students' collaborative engagement with a series of isomorphic deconstruction kits (debuggems) developed to assess their learning of coding, circuit design and creation (through sewing) in e-textiles with the LilyPad Arduino. The debuggem was designed based on our observations of common challenges that students faced when designing their own e-textiles projects during 4-week workshops. We videotaped ten students collaborating in pairs as they worked to turn on LEDs in a project strategically designed with problems in poor crafting, non-functional circuitry design and insufficient coding. Analysis includes what problems students struggled the most to solve and common types of problem solving strategies used. The debuggem was successful in that it revealed common problems, allowed for multiple solutions, and capitalized on collaborative learning. As hoped, all students solved most problems but no group solved every problem in the time allotted without help; student pairs also came up with multiple solutions. The findings indicate that deconstruction kits are not only promising tools for evaluating students' learning of designing with e-textiles but also valuable learning tools, especially when peer collaboration is taken into account.

We examine e-textile designs, a new domain combining crafts, circuitry, and programming with the LilyPad Arduino, to better understand how novice designers develop creative technical solutions. Our analyses draw from observation and interviews conducted with middle and high school students enrolled in e-textiles workshops. In the workshops, students created their own designs by re-interpreting e-textile creations from an online community or by re-purposing the conductive functionality of everyday objects. These remixes, popular in today's youth digital media culture, can also be seen as "interpretative flexibility" and promising indicators of the everyday creativity of novice designers.

Building on Csikszentmihalyi's conception of creativity as a system composed of the domain, the individual, and a field of experts who validate creative innovations, we examine a new domain of e-textiles to describe creativity. Further, we use our interviews with domain experts to outline some of the limitations of current assessment techniques to inform our understanding of creativity.

Much attention has focused on the successes of creative collaboration in online communities yet little is known about how members organize participation and collaboration at such sites. In this paper, we analyze different dimensions of collaborative agency by youth who locally self-organized in groups and participated in a collaborative design challenge in the Scratch online programming community. We report on youths‘ fluid roles in groups, their contributions in terms of feedback, and their awareness of participation in relation to the online community. In the discussion we address what we learned about new forms of collaboration, equity issues, and implications for the design of tasks which better support collective learning.

Online creative production has received considerable attention for its success in creating Wikipedia and Free and Open Source Software yet few youth participate in such voluntary online collaborations, in particular in programming contexts. In this paper, we describe how youth programmers organized collaborative groups or collabs in response to a design challenge in the Scratch Online Community. We report on participation in the “Collab Challenge” in the Scratch community at large and with particular groups, designers’ efforts in recruiting and organizing collab groups, and the role of community feedback. In the discussion, we address what we learned about youth’s informal collaborative skills, fostering community participation, and the design of online communities supportive of creative collaboration, and open issues for further research.

The focus of this paper is to investigate how writing computer programs can help children develop their storytelling and creative writing abilities. The process of writing a program---coding---has long been considered only in terms of computer science, but such coding is also reflective of the imaginative and narrative elements of fiction writing workshops. Writing to program can also serve as programming to write, in which a child learns the importance of sequence, structure, and clarity of expression---three aspects characteristic of effective coding and good storytelling alike. While there have been efforts examining how learning to write code can be facilitated by storytelling, there has been little exploration as to how such creative coding can also be directed to teach students about the narrative and storytelling process. Using the introductory programming language Scratch, this paper explores the potential of having children create their own digital stories with the software and how the narrative structure of these stories offers kids the opportunity to better understand the process of expanding an idea into the arc of a story.

Reflecting on one of Frobel's overlooked gifts, sewing and embroidery, this paper explores a recent renaissance in commercially available textile construction kits for children. Through a survey of such kits, we argue that revisiting embroidery in this digital age is a powerful leverage to introduce computation into material culture. In particular, we highlight the evolution of recent children's textile construction kits beginning with the Barbie Fashion Designer in 1996 then moving onto more recent developments, like the LilyPad Arduino, that combines computation, ICT, fashion and craft. We discuss the implications of these designs for learning, play, and broadening participation in computing fields.

The number of women and girl gamers has risen considerably in the last ten years. Women are now the majority of casual gamers; girl players participate in large numbers in virtual worlds, and professional all female teams are successful in competitions. Despite this, gender disparities remain in gaming. Women may be warriors in World of Warcraft, but they are also scantily clad "booth babes" whose sex appeal is used to promote games at trade shows. Player-generated content has revolutionized gaming, but few games marketed to girls allow "modding". Women may be into gaming but few venture into industry. In this talk, I'll examine the experiences of girl and women players in gaming communities; the need for different perspectives in game design; and concerns related to emerging serious games - games meant not only to entertain but also to educate, persuade, or change behavior. My goal is to look beyond the differences and to learn how we can design games that offer motivating, challenging, and enriching contexts for play to a more diverse population of players.

We describe our efforts to bring media arts into design work with the goals to introduce new expressive forms in programming to urban youth. We're presenting the findings from a series of workshop organized together with professional media artists that focused on immersion, interaction, color and perspective using Scratch, a media-rich programming environment. Our findings illustrate that a focused introduction of these features can be easily accomplished and help young designers to become more sophisticated in their creative expression. In the discussion we outline suggestions for activity and theme designs for future workshops.

This paper describes Scratch, a visual, block-based programming language designed to facilitate media manipulation for novice programmers. We report on the Scratch programming experiences of urban youth ages 8-18 at a Computer Clubhouse 'an after school center' over an 18-month period. Our analyses of 536 Scratch projects collected during this time documents the learning of key programming concepts even in the absence of instructional interventions or experienced mentors. We discuss the motivations of urban youth who choose to program in Scratch rather than using one of the many other software packages available to them and the implications for introducing programming at after school settings in underserved communities.

No abstract available.

Researchers evaluated the ability of 4th and 5th grade science and social science students to create Dublin Core metadata to describe their own images for inclusion in Digital Portfolio Archives. The Dublin Core was chosen because it provided a systematic, yet minimal way for students to describe these resources at the item level and relate them to collection-level metadata prepared for digitized primary sources by archivists using Encoded Archival Description (EAD). Researchers found that while students were able to supply simple elements such as title and subject with relative ease, they had difficulty moving between general and progressively more granular or refined descriptive elements. Students performed poorly in distinguishing between and completing related, but distinct metadata elements, such as title, subject, and description. Researchers also found that there are still significant issues that need to be addressed if young users in a variety of learning contexts, especially those who are only recently literate, are to be able to make sense of richer metadata such as EAD that is used to describe collections of primary source material.

Article Free Access Share on The implications of a theory of play for the design of computer toys (panel) Authors: Bill Kolomyjec View Profile , Justine Cassell MIT Media Lab MIT Media LabView Profile , Yasmine B. Kafai University of California, Los Angeles University of California, Los AngelesView Profile , Mary Williamson University of California, Berkeley University of California, BerkeleyView Profile Authors Info & Claims SIGGRAPH '97: Proceedings of the 24th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniquesAugust 1997 Pages 431–433https://doi.org/10.1145/258734.258898Published:03 August 1997Publication History 3citation611DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations3Total Downloads611Last 12 Months52Last 6 weeks5 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

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