Education Commons^™

Need Finding For An Embodied Coding Platform: Educators’ Practices And Perspectives, Tommy Sharkey, Robert Twomey, Amy Eguchi, Monica Sweet, Ying Chun Wu

Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Eight middle- and high-school Computer Science (CS) teachers in San Diego County were interviewed about the major challenges their students commonly encounter in learning computer programming. We identified strategic design opportunities -- that is, challenges and needs that can be addressed in innovative ways through the affordances of Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR). Thematic Analysis of the interviews yielded six thematic clusters: Tools for Learning, Visualization and Representation, Pedagogical Approaches, Classroom Culture, Motivation, and Community Connections. Within the theme of visualization, focal clusters centered on visualizing problem spaces and using metaphors to explain computational concepts, indicating that an AR/VR coding …