Designing for Computational Expression: Four Principles for the Design of Learning Environments towards Computational Literacy

Background

The skills associated with computational literacy have many applications, but relatively few students are given the opportunity to learn them. These skills include the ability to read as well as compose sets of instructions using a representational medium that a computer can interpret and execute, along with knowing how and when to use standard computing constructs like conditional logic, iterative structures and recursion to achieve a computational goal. While these skills are taught in computer science courses, restricting them to such contexts greatly limits the audience for this important skill set as few students take computer science courses as part of their formal schooling. Additionally, computer science courses are often designed for students who hope to pursue careers in the field of computer science. As such, they do not emphasize developing basic skills for immediate use, but instead seek to lay the foundations for future computer science studies (Guzdial & Soloway, 2003). In response to the growing recognition that, while not all students will pursue computer science, all students can nevertheless benefit from learning to express ideas in a computationally meaningful way, there have been several efforts to design so-called low-threshold computer languages that are easier to learn but still permit significant expressivity.