Digital playgrounds for early computing education

For our community 2013 could be called the year of Code.org. It made a big splash in February 2013 with its suite of YouTube videos featuring celebrities (tech pioneers Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerburg, Ruchi Sanghvi, to NBA star Chris Bosch, rock star will.i.am and follow-up videos featuring former US president Bill Clinton). If 12+ million views in less than three weeks are any indicator of potential interest among students, then the big challenge is how to tap into and deliver on the opportunities for learning computing to school-age kids? Hadi and Ali Partovi, founders of Code. org have an uncanny and tireless ability to attract the superstar talent, which includes thousands of teachers and practitioners, the resources, and perhaps the most effective PR campaign our field has ever seen. Enter Hour of Code, Code.org’s partnership with ACM, CSTA, and other computing organizations (read also as “friendly takeover”) for the annual Computer Science Education Week [7] and, in December of 2013, it reached out to inspire over 20 million students to learn to code. Crowdsourcing of local volunteers across the world seems to have solved the issue of reaching out to ten million kids. However, two big questions loom: What will we teach them in an hour of coding? And, what will we do beyond that? True to the nature of our discipline, the tools that were used for this unprecedented event are going to be somewhat of a last minute development exercise. Or so it seemed. Code.org featured a selection of tools and tutorials many of which were put together just days before the event. It was only a few weeks before the event when Rovio [15] generously made available the design and API for its Angry Birds app, as did PopCap Games [14] for its Plants vs. Zombies game. There was a lot of game or game style programming in these first time coding sessions. Many readers of this magazine might cringe at that, or perhaps jump with joy depending on what side of the pedagogic dichotomy they fall on. One set of Hour of Code tutorials targeted for elementary and middle school kids exploits visual programming environments for teaching programming. These include familiar environments like Scratch [16] and AppInventor [13] plus a whole host of new browser or tablet based interactive multimedia tutorial IDEs like Tynker [18], LightBot [12], Kodable [11], Blockly [1], and Code.org’s Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies based environment [4]. Most of the lessons employ maze-based, adventure puzzle games. Kids go through a set of graded exercises/puzzles to drive characters in a scene: a red Angry Bird going after a Green Pig; a robot like creature navigating a block of squares, etc. Kids learn the basics of programming: sequencing, selection, and iteration by using command blocks like moveForward or turnLeft. All of these environments use Scratch-like drag-and-drop command blocks to construct scripts or programs. Not all tutorials require computers or tablets. Several in Thinkersmith’s tutorials are completely unplugged, no computer is required [17]. Digital Playgrounds for Early Computing Education