How families design and program games: a qualitative analysis of a 4-week online in-home study

Abstract

Prior work has broadly explored empowering children to learn to program by making video games. However, such work has rarely considered the role of families in this learning, leaving many open questions about how inter-generational collaborations might support and constrain learning. To investigate these opportunities, we conducted a family-based study of TileCode, a rule-based programming platform for video-game programming, and scaffolded a 4-week series of game programming activities with 19 children (9 to 14 years old) and 16 parents. Using a joint media engagement lens to analyze family knowledge and programming strategies, we found: 1) families demonstrated many dynamic collaboration patterns distinct from pair programming and other collaboration models, 2) parents played a unique role in scaffolding and guiding more complex designs and programming tasks, 3) families found it challenging to start their games from scratch but benefited greatly from having programming patterns for particular game behaviors. These findings suggest the need for game programming platforms to design around the unique kinds of collaboration in inter-generational domain-specific programming.