Loops Make The Embrace More Meaningful

Caitlin Kelleher: I found that character actions like hugging another character or dribbling a basketball provide the main motivations for the use of programming constructs like loops and parameters arose. There is some risk that by providing users with a large set of high-level animations we may remove the motivation to learn programming constructs and concepts.

I like this whole paper. She taught over 200 girls to program with a visual language that hooked into something similar to The Sims. And the majority of the girls ended up with programs that had their characters spiraling off in arbitrary directions.

But I think that’s promising. Rather than all the kids ending up with the same thing. More like a painting class where it’s may all be of different quality, but it all ends up pretty expressive.