Designing a Novice Programming Environment with Children

Abstract

When children learn how to program, they gain problem- solving skills useful to them all throughout life. How can we attract more children in K-8 to learn about program- ming and be excited about it? To answer this question, we worked with a group of children aged 7-12 as our design partners. By partnering with the children, we were able to discover approaches to the topic that might appeal to our target audience. Using the children’s input from one design partnering session, we designed a prototype tangible pro- gramming experience based upon the theme of cooking. The children evaluated this prototype and gave us additional de- sign ideas in a second session. We plan to use the children’s design ideas to guide our future work.