INTERACTIONS.ACM.ORG 70 INTERACTIONS NOVEMBER–DECEMBER2017
HCI education reflects the continual evolution of HCI, embracing the changing landscapes of technology, infrastructure,
and technology use. This forum aims to provide a platform for HCI educators, practitioners, researchers, and students
to share their perspectives, reflections, and experiences related to HCI education. — Sukeshini Grandhi, Editor
FORUM HCI EDUCATION
ethnicities, gender, and culture to learn
programming through engagement.
Programming is taught by volunteers
in 65 branches located in schools,
universities, and libraries across
Denmark. There are close to 700
volunteer teachers from diverse
backgrounds and approximately 1,340
Coding Pirates, children who attend
weekly activities across Denmark. In
2015, computer science graduates from
the Department of Computer Science
at the University of Copenhagen
(DIKU) established a Coding Pirates
branch; today DIKU Coding Pirates
runs weekly workshops for an entire
school year (August to June). The
workshops each typically have 30
participants with 11 volunteer
teachers; 340 children are currently on
the waiting list.
Initial observations of the Coding
Pirates workshops took place in
October 2016, first at a public library
in Copenhagen, where we observed a
workshop with 11 children and four
teachers, and then at the DIKU
branch, with 44 children and 10
teachers. These observations
confirmed that children mainly
worked individually, with little to no
social interaction with peers during
workshops. Children were paying
attention to their own devices, the
overhead projector, or the step-by-step
guide pamphlet created by Coding
Pirates teachers. While the volunteer
teachers have excellent technical
expertise and an amazing commitment
to sharing their technical knowledge,
they lacked pedagogical training and
thus paid less attention to the social
dynamics of the workshop.
The centrality of technology places great responsibility on HCI education researchers. It’s our duty to explore strategies for teaching children the skills,
Coding Pirates (https://
codingpirates.dk) is a Danish
nonprofit social organization
dedicated to doing just that. While
Coding Pirates is a successful
initiative, it is difficult to attract
participants with diverse preferred-
learning strategies. Take this example:
In early fall 2016, one of the authors
brought her 13-year-old daughter to a
Coding Pirates event. During the two
hours, she developed her first
computer game in the language
Scratch, which she proudly displayed.
However, when asked to join the
Coding Pirates event the following
week, she replied that she did not find
it fun to sit alone, but instead
preferred to collaborate with others.
In other words, even though she’d
participated in a group event, she did
not interpret what she’d done as
collaborating with others.
While you could claim that this was
an individual case, our previous
experiences as volunteers during
Coding Pirates events confirmed that
children primarily worked
individually. Thus, our research began
to focus on how to design a workshop
format for the Coding Pirates that
would explicitly foster collaboration
and interaction across participants so
as to attract and retain new types of
inclusive participation—and cater to
children who prefer socially organized
learning strategies.
Here we present our educational
initiative for introducing newcomers
to programming, which we designed
and conducted for Coding Pirates in
the fall of 2016. Our initiative is
grounded in HCI strategies for social
interaction and tangible experiences.
Based upon our findings, we argue
that reframing coding as a social and
tangible activity fundamentally
transforms the coding activity in a
way that could attract young children
from various backgrounds to the field
of computing, thus fostering increased
inclusion through early introduction
to programming.
CODING PIRATES
Coding Pirates seeks to foster a
creative environment for children
between 7 and 17 years old across
Olivia L. Tabel, Jonathan Jensen, Martin Dybdal, and Pernille Bjørn, University of Copenhagen
Coding as a Social
and Tangible Activity
Insights
→ Conceptually approaching
programming as a social and
tangible human-computer
activity is an opportunity to
develop new ways of teaching
programming and technology
development, potentially
fostering inclusion.
→ When designing teaching
activities, we must consider
how the social context
we create matters for
the learning experience.