Design philosophy
It is no secret that children in the United States are falling behind their international peers in math and science proficiency. This education gap is sure to create major economic challenges in the future as the technology continues to grow in global prevalance and importance. Concurrently, recent educational surveys show that children still see computer programmers in stereotypical terms: the image of computer programming in contemporary culture is troubling. Media portrays images of loner, “geeky guys” immobile in front of their machines. An understanding of computer science is becoming as important as reading, writing, and arithmetic, while it continues to be stigmatized and largely inaccessible to women and minorities.
While we know that computer science is a creative, expressive, team-oriented and very often fun and challenging field, this understanding is not well communicated to the majority of the population. What is needed, then, is social change: new play systems, new interaction models, expressive programming, and new role models in the field. We are designing systems which strengthen each child’s role in an ever-growing digital environment.
What would happen if everyone in the US learned how to program computers at the same time they learned to read and write English? Our projects are motivated by a desire to improve all children’s, especially disadvantaged children’s, overall aptitude and attitude towards science, math, and technology. Rapunsel is designed to help students become comfortable and confident with computer science by taking a play-centric approach to education.
The game takes place on a once-happy dance-driven planet, where evil Gabblers have come from the underworld and taken all good things away. The player is sent to make things right again. Players start off with a few other characters in a barren, empty world and have to “win” the everyday things they were used to (trees, flowers, playgrounds) back in the days before the Gabblers arrived.
To restore the world, players have to create new moves in their
repertoire, and compete with the Gabblers, by challenging them in dance competitions. Every cool thing players do with dance brings back an element that was once thriving in the world.
To compete, players program “moves” into their clothing. Shirts control the arms, pants, the leg moves, and shoes, the feet movements. Players can combine shirt, pants, and shoes into “outfits” and call these in code and via hot keys, so players can react instantaneously. Dance competitions resemble call and response (DDR-style) challenges, with players using moves they’ve prepared ahead of time on the fly.
