MediaScripting: teaching introductory CS by through interactive graphics scripting (abstract only)

upswing, Computer science teachers continue to strive for new examples and problems to interest millenials. The Media Computation approach (Guzdial 2003) has proven successful in attracting students in contexts from community colleges to R1 universities - students are clearly excited by writing programs that make images. In this project, take Media Computing in new directions: we have students build images by interactively scripting an application, which means that they can more easily experiment and mix work that they create "by hand" and work that they create "by programming"; we work collaboratively with studio art faculty, so students build works that must meet underlying design criteria; we teach using the workshop approach, so most classes involve students working in small teams on a set of problems; and we use a multi-paradigm approach - students make images using functional, declarative, imperative, and object-oriented techniques. This approach has proven quite successful - our enrollments are up (at least 33% in CS1, 50% in CS2). We are attracting more women (now 1/3 of our students). And comparative data suggest that our students gain significantly more confidence in their abilities than do student in other introductory science courses.