Building knowledge and confidence with mediascripting: a successful interdisciplinary approach to CS1

As the Media Computing approach has shown, writing programs that make images excites a wide variety of students. In this paper, we report on five years of experience with a new approach to media computation, which we call "media scripting". In our introductory class, students build images by interactively scripting an application, so they can experiment easily and mix work "by hand" and "by code"; we collaborate with studio art faculty, so students build works meeting design criteria; and we emphasize multiple paradigms, so students make images using functional, declarative, imperative, and object-oriented techniques. Our approach has proven quite successful--enrollments are up (at least 33% in CS1, 50% in CS2) and we attract more women (currently 40% of the students in the first course, 25% of those in the second course). Other outcomes are equally positive. For example, comparative data show that our students gain significantly more confidence in their abilities than students in other introductory science courses.