Middle school girls + games programming = information technology fluency

  • Authors:

  • Linda L. Werner;Shannon Campe;Jill Denner

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Santa Cruz;ETR Associates, Scotts Valley, CA;ETR Associates, Scotts Valley, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 6th conference on Information technology education
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In this paper we describe an after-school program that aims to develop information technology (IT) fluency by teaching middle school girls to make computer games. We focus on IT fluency rather than IT literacy because to participate in the current and future world of technology, students must develop fluency in three kinds of IT knowledge: contemporary skills, fundamental concepts, and intellectual capabilities rather than just literacy skills. The acquisition of fluency is more likely to happen in the context of a program like ours because of its emphasis on project-based work and a collaborative learning environment utilizing pair programming. The details of how IT fluency knowledge was acquired in the game programming part of our program are published elsewhere, so we only summarize those results here. The focus of this paper is on how participants have made substantial strides toward IT fluency due to aspects of our program as a whole. In this paper we provide many examples of how our program leads to IT fluency by addressing not just contemporary IT skills, but also intellectual capabilities and fundamental IT concepts.