Culturally Situated Design Tool: The Dance Choreography Tool

This paper presents the design of the Culturally Situated Design Tool (CSDT) known as the Dance Choreography Tool. The Dance Tool was created as a supplementary educational aid for high school students to learn the basics of computer programming by scripting dance moves for a 3D avatar. Even though there are other methods of teaching computer programming, the dance tool will increase motivation in learning programming by providing an environment that encourages creativity and diversity while focusing on the logic behind computer programming. By increasing the interest of computer programming on a high school level, the dance tool will also help solve the problem with the decline of people entering the field of computer science in undergraduate and graduate school.