Coding choreography: Understanding student responses to representational incompatibilities between dance and programming

Abstract

This paper considers how a curricular design that integrated computer programming and creative movement shaped students’ engagement with computing. We draw on data from a camp for middle schoolers, focusing on an activity in which students used the programming environment NetLogo to re-represent their physical choreography. We analyze the extent to which students noticed incompatibilities (mismatches between possibilities in dance and NetLogo), and how encountering them shaped their coding. Our findings suggest that as students attended to incompatibilities, they experienced struggle, but persisted and engaged in iterative cycles of design. Our work suggests that tensions between arts and programming may promote student engagement.

Keywords:

• Programming
• computer science
• dance
• representation
• struggle
• design

Acknowledgments

The design of the Movement & Coding Camp analyzed in this paper came from the artistic histories and practices of Rebecca Steinberg & Curtis Thomas. The Camp was run by four math teachers—Nikki Newman Higdon, Shannon Reider, Hannah Strickland, and Kate Tarne—whose enthusiasm and pedagogical choices made these activities really dance. This article benefited from feedback by our research group: Amanda Bell, Madison Knowe, and Candice Love. This work was supported by Grant number (DRL-1742257) from the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Declaration of interest

We have no conflicts of interests to disclose.

Notes

1 Transcription conventions: Throughout this paper, … denote pauses in speech. ((activity descriptions)) appear in italics within double parentheses.

Additional information

Funding

NSF. Funding Body ID: 20. Grant ID DRL-1742257.

Notes on contributors

Selena Steinberg

Selena Steinberg is a graduate student studying Learning Sciences at Indiana University. She is interested in exploring the potential of the arts and embodiment for supporting students’ engagement with and identities in STEM.

Melissa Gresalfi

Melissa Gresalfi is a professor of Mathematics Education and Learning Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Her research considers how interactions, contexts, and broader narratives organize the identities students develop in STEM, and how learning environments can be transformed to support the development of more productive relationships with STEM disciplines.

Lauren Vogelstein

Lauren Vogelstein is a Postdoctoral Associate at New York University. She studies how people learn from an embodied and interactionist perspective that leverages the artistic practices of dancers and choreographers in order to better design expansive STEM learning environments for students.

Corey Brady

Corey Brady is an Assistant Professor of the Learning Sciences at Vanderbilt University. He studies computational and mathematical modeling, with a focus on supporting and studying learning environments in which groups of learners find they can accomplish things together that they cannot do individually.