Designing Creative Programing Experiences for 15 Years Old Students

It is well known in the computer science education community that is important to encourage students to acquire programming skills and become creators and not only mere consumers. Different students have different needs and learning styles when introduced to programming and making activities, however it is challenging to accommodate all these needs while you design a workshop activity. In our approach we have designed and implemented a workshop program of 23 students’ total, with the final goal of exploring and improving the design of appropriate workshops using the current learning environments. This paper presents an initial exploratory evaluation of a workshop program and the development of a set of guidelines for improving student experience. A set of best practices was developed through a focus group with experts using the technique of affinity diagrams. The results should be useful for designers and researchers who work with design and evaluation of programming workshop programs.