Using Scaffolded Activities to Teach Computational Thinking to Middle School Girls

We describe a set of workshop activities designed around computational thinking concepts and skills for GirlsCreateIT!, an after-school program to provide middle school girls the opportunity to learn about computing. Each workshop activity was created to introduce the girls to computing tools and computational thinking while also being fun and motivating; examples include working with stories and games as well as simple web applications. We evaluated the effectiveness of the activities over six weeks, with two groups of 14-16 girls. Our evaluation confirmed that the activities were engaging to the girls, and that the scaffolding we designed into the activities allowed for quick start up in these relatively brief after-school sessions, while still meeting learning objectives. In this paper we discuss the design of the learning activities, findings from our preliminary evaluation, and implications for the future design and deployment of computational thinking activities for this