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.