ABSTRACTCategories and Subject DescriptorsGeneral TermsKey WordsINTRODUCTIONMETHODSFINDINGSOf the 11 digital stories collected and analyzed, all incorporated multiple characters (minimally, a protagonist as well as an antagonist) and 8 out of 11 (73%) of the digital stories made use of multiple stages, which included a train yard, a castle,...However, over the remaining four weeks, as kids began to expand upon their individual storylines and develop their own digital stories, programming aspects such as debugging scripts and coordinating coding sequences grew incrementally more important t...Table 1: Some of the programming concepts utilized by club members’ projectsDISCUSSIONProgramming & Storytelling: Opportunities for Learning About Coding & Composition Quinn Burke Doctoral Candidate University of Pennsylvania 3700 Walnut St. Philadelphia, PA 19104 [email protected] Yasmin B. Kafai Professor of Learning Sciences University of Pennsylvania 3700 Walnut St. Philadelphia, PA 19104 [email protected] ABSTRACT The focus of this paper is to investigate how writing computer programs can help children develop their storytelling and creative writing abilities. The process of writing a program—coding—has long been considered only in terms of computer science, but such coding is also reflective of the imaginative and narrative elements of fiction writing workshops. Writing to program can also serve as programming to write, in which a child learns the importance of sequence, structure, and clarity of expression—three aspects characteristic of effective coding and good storytelling alike. While there have been efforts examining how learning to write code can be facilitated by storytelling, there has been little exploration as to how such creative coding can also be directed to teach students about the narrative and storytelling process. Using the introductory programming language Scratch, this paper explores the potential of having children create their own digital stories with the software and how the narrative structure of these stories offers kids the opportunity to better understand the process of expanding an idea into the arc of a story. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Information Science Education – Literacy. General Terms Human Factors Key Words Computers & Writing, Digital Storytelling INTRODUCTION In this paper, we take a first step towards understanding how programming activities can support students’ narrative and composition skills. While there have been several efforts using introductory programming for storytelling and making games, these focused on facilitating entrance into programming activities but not necessarily on directly supporting kids’ capacity to structure and develop a meaningful story. In this paper, we first review the history of creative composition with technology tools, then present a writing and media design tool and our use of it with middle school kids in an after-school program. We conclude by exploring the potential ways coding and creative writing overlap and how this new design tool can tap into students’ storytelling abilities to further their aptitude for writing, in general. BACKGROUND When computers first emerged on the K-12 landscape in the early 1980s, their capacity to facilitate kids’ composition skills was mostly conceived in terms of their ability to make for “cleaner” looking compositions [4]. No longer burdened by aesthetic concerns, such as bad handwriting, computer word processing allowed students to direct increased attention to more significant considerations such as grammatically revising their papers. Using the computer as a word processor helped minimize aesthetic concerns by creating a standard look to compositions—whether it was 12 or 14 point font, double or single-spaced; kids’ compositions with word processor still looked largely identical. However, in the 1990s, as computers gained the capacity to store and display a growing variety of visual and audio features, the aesthetic look of a paper not only grew more significant but became integral to the text itself. Students’ written composition became populated with images and sounds [8], and researchers of new media studies found that integrating visual images with written text could both enhance and accelerate student comprehension [2, 14]. Out of this combination of words, images, and audio (as well as from a broadening conception of “text”) came the practice of digital storytelling [13]. With its earliest incarnation in the late 1980s, digital storytelling has since emerged as a growing medium by which to introduce youth to the applications of storytelling, writing, and technology using images and sounds [9, 14]. By accompanying words and multi-media effects, kids have increased opportunities to express themselves creatively and learn to integrate the traditional literacy of writing with those of digital manipulation and media production. One particular form of digital storytelling that recently has emerged has used programming as a media text production tool. Like new media studies, programming-as-writing relies upon words, images, and sounds to create multi-modal digital stories. But whereas new media studies focused on accompanying words with images, video, and Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. IDC 2010, June 9–12, 2010, Barcelona, Spain. Copyright 2010 ACM 978-1-60558-951-0/10/06…$10.00.audio to enhance the text, programming-as-writing treats words as the driving component producing these multimedia features. Instead of co-existing with digital graphics and sound effects on the screen, words act as the fundamental language which animates these graphics and coordinates their movement to sound effects. Bruckman’s MOOSE Crossing [1] is an early example of programming-as-writing, allowing players (ages 8-13) to program their own narrative elements in a text-based virtual world. However, whereas inputting code in MOOSE Crossing consisted solely of entering text,