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WHAT DID WE DO?
In close collaboration with DIKU
Coding Pirates, we designed two
experimental workshops. The first
focused on introducing coding as a
social activity, while the second
introduced coding as both a social and
a tangible activity. The first workshop
ran on November 22, 2016, and the
second workshop ran a week later, on
November 29. Both workshops took
place between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. on a
weekday at the university campus in
Copenhagen. For each workshop, 10
participants were recruited from the
DIKU Coding Pirates waiting list. In
total, 20 children participated. By
recruiting from the waiting list, we
ensured that no participants had
previous experience with Coding
Pirates events. The recruitment did
not take into account, however,
whether children had prior
experience with coding from other
situations (school, home, etc.). Our
participants were between 8 and 14
years old; they were 60 percent male
and 40 percent female. The
workshops were led by four teachers:
the first, second, and third author,
and one additional DIKU Coding
Pirates volunteer.
Programming as social interaction.
The programming curriculum of our
workshops was the same as in the
regular introductory Coding Pirates
workshops. It included an introduction
to Scratch, a programming language
and graphic programming interface
known to help novice programmers
learn to code [ 1]. However, we used it
with two distinct innovations: We
introduced pair programming, which
articulates programming as a social
activity (workshop 1), and we extended
the curriculum beyond Scratch
(workshop 2) by adding tangible
programming experiences using
Makey Makey [ 2].
Pair programming was our major
intervention. We used it to demonstrate
coding as a social activity. By
introducing the distinct roles in
programming—the navigator and the
driver [ 3]—we were able to manifest
coding as a socially embedded activity
supporting collaborative learning [ 4].
The navigator was responsible for
analyzing the situations and making
suggestions on how to code, while the
driver was responsible for typing and
writing the code. To demonstrate the
differences between the roles, we
created a car-front mock-up used to
role-play pair programming. To further
distinguish between roles, two sets of
hats ( 10 yellow and 10 black hats) were
distributed to the teams, which meant
that all drivers were wearing yellow
hats and all navigators were wearing
black hats (Figure 1).
Participants were divided into five
teams of two, with different-colored
hats. The hats made it easier for the
participants to know their role; it also
made the role division visible across the
teams. During the event, the teachers
asked the pairs to swap roles and hats,
which made the shift in roles clear.
The task was to create a game.
However, instead of spending time
introducing all the features of the
programming environment, we
designed the task using the fading
example, a scaffolding technique in
We used pair
programming to
demonstrate coding
as a social activity.