Fun Learning Stagecast Creator: An Exercise in Minimalism and Collaboration Cheryl Seals, Mary Beth Rosson, John M. Carroll, Tracy Lewis, and Lenese Colson Virginia Tech Center for Human-Computer Interaction, Blacksburg, VA 24060 USA {cseals, rosson, jcarroll, tracyl, lcolson}@vt.edu Abstract We are attempting to create a cross-generational learning community who will work together to design, construct, and discuss simulations of community topics. The simulations are built with Stagecast Creator, a state- of-the art visual programming environment [12]. As part of this larger project, we have developed minimalist training materials for middle school students. This paper reports a formative evaluation of these training materials, in which groups of students worked together on two related tutorial modules. In general the students were successful in their work with Creator, needing little aid from the experimenters, and showing evidence of enjoyment. Our aim is to develop materials that will attract participation and enable students to spend their free time and play with this environment, and as a by- product of having fun, learn more about visual programming. 1. Introduction Modern community networks leverage the resources and infrastructure of the World Wide Web to post and manage a variety of community resources. But it is not enough to simply post information once and for all: to ensure that a community network stays “alive”, its users must be able and willing to assist in maintaining its current resources, and to develop new activities that will engage each other and promote community interaction [9]. If this is to happen, community members must first acquire end-user programming skills, that enable them to design, contribute, and refine resources related to specific community concerns. We are exploring the use of one end-user programming paradigm that might be a source of community interaction—the design and discussion of visual simulations that illustrate community issues. Our initial focus is on two very different segments of our community—middle school students and senior citizens. Our hope is that the simulation activities will bring these groups together, both in identifying and constructing simulation problems, and in discussing and refining existing simulations. An early design workshop with the senior citizens was promising, in that the participants quickly understood and “bought in” to the concept of community simulations, and they were able to contribute their own design ideas [9]. In this paper we report some of our early work with school children. A critical issue has been how best to train and motivate students to participate in the simulation building activities. We want the students to be able to learn on their own, outside of the classroom, and to have enough fun doing this that they will continue to learn and to make their own contributions. As a starting point we have developed a minimalist tutorial for Stagecast Creator, the visual simulation tool that the students and other project participants will use to build their simulations. In the remainder of the paper, we first overview the Stagecast Creator tool, and then describe our minimalist approach to training students to use this tool. In the balance we present and discuss the results of a formative evaluation of this tutorial. 2. Stagecast Creator Stagecast Creator (SC) is based on a movie metaphor, where users create a cast of characters who interact and move within a simulation microworld in Stagecast Creator. This tool is a commercial version of KidSim/Cocoa, and includes the use of a macro-recorder to allow novice users to program by demonstrating an “example” [12]. Its Proceedings of the IEEE 2002 Symposia on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC’02) 0-7695-1644-0/02 $17.00 © 2002 IEEE