G. Subsol (Ed.): VS 2005, LNCS 3805, pp. 251 – 259, 2005. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005

The Rapunsel Project

Ken Perlin1, Mary Flanagan2, and Andrea Hollingshead3

1 New York University, USA 2 Hunter College, USA

3 University of South California, USA http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/

Abstract. By use of a dance game, and after much input and advice from thir-teen year old design consultants, we teach Java programming in a way that will interest middle school girls - a critical age group for addressing gender inequity in programming.

1 Introduction

The RAPUNSEL (Real-time Applied Programming for Underrepresented Students' Early Learning) project is now entering the third year of a three year grant from the National Science Foundation. This paper serves as a progress report, at a point where much of the capability has been implemented at the Media Research Laboratory at New York University and the Tiltfactor Laboratory at Hunter College, but formal testing (scheduled for the third and final year) has not yet been done. Because of the importance of the problem that the project addresses, and the time-critical nature of research in this area, it was felt that it is important to present a snapshot of the pro-ject's progress, even before the results of formal testing are in.

The problem is as follows: There is a critical shortage of women in Computer Sci-ence (CS) careers and degree programs. Margolis and Fisher, in their landmark study of gender and CS, note that the male dominance in information technology can be linked to the social, cultural, and educational influences and patterns formed in child-hood [2, 17]. Research shows that although girls are as talented as boys in math and science, and although most girls are excited about science in childhood, these same girls begin to lose interest in math and science in middle school [8, 9]. By the eighth grade, twice as many boys as girls show an interest in science, engineering, and mathematics careers [10]. While opportunities for CS-related careers are broadening, and programming skills are required in many diverse fields, fewer and fewer girls are attracted to CS related activities. New resources are needed to engage girls in com-puter programming activities.

For example, according to an NSF survey, 93% of programmers in the USA are men, and only 7% of programmers are women. This is an enormous gender imbal-ance. Some studies show the gender imbalance in computer science as the worst among the engineering professions. Why is this the case? To summarize briefly the results of a number of studies: i) There are social and cultural preconceptions about

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science that influence girls' involvement in programming and, later, computer science, ii) Programming is taught outside a larger context, and the reason to learn program-ming is thus unclear, and iii) programming is taught as a "loner activity". These fac-tors lead to under-involvement from girls among a variety of ethnic and socioeco-nomic backgrounds.

At the same time the demand for participants in CS is increasing, fewer girls than boys enroll in CS classes, feel self-confident with computers, and use computers out-side the classroom-- fewer than 33% of participants in computer courses and related programs are girls [1, 10]. Research shows that females experience a reduction in self-esteem during adolescence, negatively affecting their achievements and narrowing their aspirations [21, 24]. Middle school girls statistically drop out of math and sci-ence classes or do not perform well, and adolescence is often the final time girls con-sider the diverse array of career opportunities in technical areas, especially CS [22]. The most significant reasons cited in research for this lack of interest are that girls often underestimate their own abilities and are not engaged by the content of such programs [4, 5, 14]. Women and girls consistently report a lack of confidence in their computer skills [7, 13, 15, 18, 20, 25]. Although women constitute roughly half of the US population, they are significantly underrepresented in CS degree programs and professions [12]. Nearly 75% of future jobs will require computer use, and yet fewer than 33% of participants in computer courses and related activities are girls; by 2010, the largest industries and fastest growing job opportunities will be computer related, specifically, in CS and engineering fields [23]. The current science, engineering and technology workforce is only 19% female [10].

These figures point to an emergency situation in computer literacy for girls. Girls need to be reached before adolescence to keep them interested in science and math and to foster their achievement in these curricular areas. Specifically, girls need to be encouraged not only to be computer users, but also become those at the forefront of creating new computer technologies. Bruckman et. al. found that gender does not affect programming ability or performance, but while girls spend significantly more time than boys communicating with others in computer supported learning environ-ments, boys are more likely than girls to have prior programming experience, and spend more time programming on average [6]. This research recommends that in order to increase gender equity in technical computer skills, developers should focus on strategies for fostering interest among girls. Yet no commercial software exists to encourage middle school girls to learn software design and computer programming, and the types of software directed at girls has neither increased nor diversified since the seminal work of Laurel [16].

Computer games that currently attract girls are thus important to our research. Games for girls have been studied through commissions sponsored by groups such as the AAUW. A recent review of popular mathematics programs targeted at K - 6th grade showed that only 12 % of the characters were female, and those played passive roles such as "princess" [3]. Studies of gender and play have shown that girls are more likely than boys to engage in parallel and constructive play as well as peer

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conversations [19]. Game environments such as The SIMS and NeoPets engage play-ers in interesting variations of constructive play - players create virtual households or create and care for virtual pets. However, players do not learn extensive technical skills playing in such commercial game environments. Criteria for truly equitable software must go beyond representation and game scenarios and allow models which empower students to be software designers and have technical and creative control over their own environments.

If girls can access programming processes and compelling environments early, they will be able to make their own creations, construct significant objects and envi-ronments which reflect the way girls think, represent their values and opinions, and lead to the formation of new knowledge. In addition, such experience will enable them to participate in the currently male-dominated software industry as a generation of girls becomes technological creators [3]. If we can broaden the participation of all middle school girls with techniques and possibilities that they can relate to their ac-tual, everyday lives and can expand upon in a virtual environment, this will rearrange the dynamics in the creative terrain of computational media. Indeed, the eventual aim of gender equity research should emphasize the diverse range of interests and prefer-ences for all students, so that through good design, creative environments, and cus-tomization, we are able to create experiences which will ultimately support a broad spectrum of learners.

The purpose of our project is to build a successful software environment to ad-dress this imbalance. The goal is to develop an engaging way to teach computer pro-gramming to middle school girls in a scalable, approachable manner that appeals to girls' sense of communication, curiosity, and play. Specifically, this project aims to study how the social design of a programming software environment affects girls' motivations to program, their ability to learn programming concepts, and the extent to which girls' overall confidence and self-efficacy levels are affected by the RAPUNSEL environment.

Specifically, the RAPUNSEL project aims to encourage girls to become familiar with the sort of programming language (in particular Java) that they will encounter several years later, in high school. This is done in the context of a dance game: Play-ers teach animated characters to dance. A large part of the "game mechanic" is the gathering and modification of code that adds to the dance repertoire of the characters. In the course of this, the players not only learn, but also have fun and form a social community of fellow programmers. Ultimately, it is our hope that such a 'self-teaching' environment, in which girls are motivated to learn Java programming in-crementally through a pro-active game experience that allows them to master funda-mental programming concepts, will lead them to transfer this knowledge to situations outside of our project.

We note that categorizing 'girls' together in a group is a potentially problematic task for which there must be a clear reason, such as working overall for gender equity issues science and technology. Attempting to create something for 'girls' as a category obviously navigates a dangerous border zone between personal, specific, lived

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experience, and over-generalization. 'Girls' are as diverse in their interests, abilities, and tastes as any other category of people (e.g., 'students' or 'the French'). In gender research in the games industry, designers must be able to work towards gender equity without falling into stereotyping traps, realizing the inherent breadth and contradic-tions of categorization. The goal of this approach, then, is to design for a multiplicity of experiences, parts of which could be co-opted or rebuilt entirely by the users. Fo-cusing on a few of the niche interests expressed by girls involved in this work may help diversify all kinds of game goals and address numerous types of play styles. Therefore, one way to address designing for girls is to design for a multiplicity of play styles while providing diverse thematic content.

2 Approach

The approach to creating the game has been to posit a virtual world that contains engaging non-player characters. We have been working with 12-13 year old girls in the New York City area, who have been operating as design consultants. As we de-velop various aspects of the game world and the user interface, we continually go to these design consultants for informal feedback, in a continual cycle of testing and refinement. In particular, we have found it extremely useful to work with girls in computer clubs in Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx.

3 Tasks

The major tasks of the RAPUNSEL project have fallen into three broad areas: (i) animation design, (ii) game-play / interface / feedback, and (ii) assessment and measurement. Roughly speaking, these tasks have been divided among the three au-thors (Perlin/Animation, Flanagan/Game-design, Hollingshead/Assessment), with much of the work implemented by graduate students at New York University and Hunter College. Each of these areas needs to be described in somewhat more detail.

3.1 Animation Design

A key aspect of the game design is that there is an "always running" simulation world. Characters express their personality through movement and of course through choice of apparel. The game design assumes a slow, high-latency synchronization between players. For this reason, the actual animation is done locally, with a periodically up-dated server maintaining world consistency, using a blackboard model of shared data representation.

In the course of the project, various approaches to appearance and movement were tried for the animated characters and their environment. Our first, relatively abstract, characters were well received by adults and small children, but were not considered "cool" enough by the target group:

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We subsequently did systematic testing with our design consultants to find out what sorts of characters they prefer. We presented them with a wide variety of charac-ter model ideas, drawn from our own designs (one set of examples is shown above) as well as from the popular culture. These ideas were variably abstract, cartoonish, "cute", realistic, and so forth. Unfortunately, we discovered a near-universal prefer-ence among 12-13 year old girls for the sorts of over-sexualized role models currently represented in popular culture by Britney Spears and Christine Aguilera, and we were reluctant to feed into such stereotypes. Eventually we came up with a working com-promise - characters that were attractive and sassy, and that the target audience found to be cool, but who were not overly sexualized. One such character is visible in the screen-shot of the next section.

3.2 Game-Play/Interface

Game play in RAPUNSEL consists of several essential components. We want the core of the experience to be the creation, exchange and modification of code, but we also want to establish early within the players a sense of connection and identification with the characters. For this reason, several components were added to game play, including and a separate interaction space for players to customize the appearance of their character, and a private area for players to practice dance moves with their character.

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One thing we found decisively in our work with the design consultants is that movement wins out over conversation. Players want to see that characters move, and like to have control over those movements. This turned out to be a significant motivator.

Interface design was a challenge, largely in the sense that it lay at the core of sev-eral research questions. Specifically, what is the proper way to introduce code, and how "smart" should a smart text editor be? At one extreme, players can be given a plain text window for editing Java code. But this extreme approach defeats the pur-pose of a graceful and fun introduction to coding - one impasse caused by a misplaced semicolon and the potential young programmer is turned off to the whole experience.

At the other extreme, a code window which hides all type declarations and semico-lons and many other semantic and syntactic elements from the user's view does not serve the purpose of introducing the Java language. Our approach has been to treat this dialectic as a subject for formal testing. We have been building a smart text editor with switches in it, so that various levels of simple to sophisticated presentation are possible.

The interface consists of a set of code and chat windows transparently overlaid onto a screen-filling game play area. After much experimentation we settled on the Torque game engine for the implementation platform. The final decision was based on performance, and the feature set of the game simulator itself, on ease and flexibil-ity of implementing customized text overlays, and on the ease with which we could port our character animation component. Some views of the game with text and graphics overlays are shown below:

3.3 Code Exchange

In order to build a community of game players, the game design encourages - and rewards - players for sharing code with each other in order to collaboratively build character movement and abilities. This promotes a sense of familiarity with code, and

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encourages players to think of the code itself as something to discuss and to under-stand together. Below is a set of snapshots from a player/player interaction in which one player is sharing code with another:

3.4 Assessment

Assessment consists of two phases: a pre-test and a post-test. The pre-test is designed to establish a base level; it is important o measure the level of knowledge, conceptual sophistication, and attitude toward computers and programming that players of the RAPUNSEL game had before encountering the project, in order to properly assess the impact of playing the game upon those factors.

Assessment focuses on the following general questions: (i) what game play and goals do girls care about? (ii) how much do social status / personality matter? (iii) is learning being properly scaffolded?

The term scaffolding is used in education to denote the appropriate exposure to new material at each step in the learning of new content or concepts. Proper scaffold-ing is key to the success of a game-based learning project. If subjects are introduced two quickly or in a confusing order, then players will become frustrated and lose interest. Conversely, if the same concept is dwelt upon for two long, then players will become bored, and again they will lose interest. we use formal assessment to measure the effect of order and rate of advancement for essential programming concepts, in-cluding variables, conditional expressions, loops and procedures.

For example, is it better to introduce procedures without arguments early on, and then introduce procedures with arguments only after players have become familiar with variables? Similarly, is it better to introduce variable assignment together with the use of variables, or should this more advanced concept be introduced much later?

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These are not questions that can be answered a priori, but only through carefully designed assessment protocols with an actual population of kids.

4 Conclusions

RAPUNSEL represents an incremental approach to wide-scale cultural change in gender equity issues in math and science. We are conducting this research to afford cultural diversity, individual learner diversity, and cultural change through a relevant and useful programming environment. The program's goals and open-ended architec-ture will ultimately encourage others to build communities and artifacts that matter to all individuals and groups.

Not only does RAPUNSEL address issues relating to gender equity and the digital divide, but we also believe that collaborative learning software such as RAPUNSEL will help to facilitate a more fundamental change in society: increasing computer literacy. Computer literacy for all is imperative for any modern society to maintain a diverse, globally engaged workforce of scientists, engineers and well-prepared citi-zens. This literacy must include computer programming and computer science fun-damentals: and involve both reading (using existing computer applications) and writ-ing (making one's own applications). Literacy, however, does not simply involve technical expertise. Literacy is a widespread and socially engaged system of skills, capabilities, and creativity formed in the context of a material support [11]. Therefore we must not only focus on the material support (software environments) but also on the social: the values, interests, motivations, and community practices of learners. Our project takes small steps towards big changes by addressing the unmet needs of mid-dle school-age girls, but we envision a much larger and more fundamental application for the knowledge that will be gained from this project.

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