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Our work aims to increase the collaborative ability of college students in computer science classrooms where students must work towards a shared goal with peers from different backgrounds and abilities. Our work focuses specifically on leveraging high-quality collaborative design to bridge the gap between fiber arts and robotics by enlightening students to their shared foundations in mathematics and computational thinking. We achieve this goal through the design of SPEERLoom (Semi-automated Pattern Executing Educational Robotic Loom), a new open-source Jacquard loom kit designed to foster students' exploration of weaving, mechatronics, mathematics, and computational thinking. In this demonstration we present SPEERLoom and allow the exploration of a sample lesson using the loom.
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Rainbow Agents: A Collaborative Game For Computational Literacy
This paper describes the design of a collaborative game, called Rainbow Agents, that has been created to promote computational literacy through play. In Rainbow Agents, players engage directly with computational concepts by programming agents to plant and maintain a shared garden space. Rainbow Agents was designed to encourage collaborative play and shared sense-making from groups who are typically underrepresented in computer science. In this paper, we discuss how that design goal informed the mechanics of the game, and how each of those mechanics affords different goal alignments towards gameplay (e.g. competitive versus collaborative). We apply this framework using a case from an early implementation, describing how player goal alignments towards the game changed within the course of a single play session. We conclude by discussing avenues of future work as we begin data collection in two heavily diverse science museum locations.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1713439
- PAR ID:
- 10177396
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI:PLAY '19
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 597 to 604
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3341215.3356312
