Storytelling Alice: Presenting programming as a means to the end of storytelling

• Speaker: Dr. Caitlin Kelleher, , Carnegie Mellon University
• Location: CH 430
• Date: Friday, May 11
• Time: 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Seminar Abstract

The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) estimates
that the number of incoming college students intending to major in
computer science has dropped by 70% since 2000, despite the fact that
the projected need for computer scientists continues to grow.
Increasing the numbers of female students who pursue computer science
has the potential both to help fill projected computing jobs and
improve the technology we create by diversifying the viewpoints that
influence technology design. Numerous studies have found that girls
begin to turn away from math and science related disciplines,
including computer science, during middle school. By the end of
eighth grade, twice as many boys as girls are interested in pursuing
science, engineering, or technology based careers.

In this talk, I will describe the development of
Storytelling Alice, a programming environment that gives middle
school girls a positive first experience with computer programming.
Rather than presenting programming as an end in itself, Storytelling
Alice presents programming as a means to the end of storytelling, a
motivating activity for a broad spectrum of middle school girls. More
than 250 girls participated in the formative user testing of
Storytelling Alice. To determine girls' storytelling needs, I
observed girls interacting with successive versions of Storytelling
Alice and analyzed their storyboards and the programs they developed.
To enable and encourage middle school girls to create the kinds of
stories they envision, Storytelling Alice includes high-level
animations that enable users to program social interaction between
characters, a gallery of 3D objects designed to spark story ideas,
and a story-based tutorial presented using Stencils, a novel tutorial
interaction technique.

To determine the impact of the storytelling focus on girls'
interest in and success at learning to program, I conducted a study
comparing the experiences of girls introduced to programming using
Storytelling Alice with those of girls introduced to programming
using a version of Alice without storytelling features (Generic
Alice). Participants who used Storytelling Alice and Generic Alice
were equally successful at learning basic programming concepts.
However, I found that users of Storytelling Alice show more evidence
of engagement with programming. Storytelling Alice users spent 42%
more time programming and were more than three times as likely to
sneak extra time to continue working on their programs (51% of
Storytelling Alice users vs. 16% of Generic Alice users snuck extra
time). I will conclude by discussing future directions for
introducing programming through storytelling as well as other
potential contexts for storytelling.

Speaker Biography

Caitlin Kelleher is currently a post-doctoral researcher in Computer
Science and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University.
She received her bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Virginia
Tech and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon
University with Professor Randy Pausch. Caitlin was a National
Science Foundation Graduate Fellow.