Revisiting the media generation: Youth media use and computational literacy instruction

Abstract

An ongoing challenge of 21st century learning is ensuring everyone has the requisite skills to participate in a digital, knowledge-based economy. Once an anathema to parents and teachers, digital games are increasingly at the forefront of conversations about ways to address student engagement and provoke challenges to media pedagogies. While advances in game-based learning are already transforming educative practices globally, with tech giants like Microsoft, Apple and Google taking notice and investing in educational game initiatives, there is a concurrent and critically important development that focuses on “game construction” pedagogy as a vehicle for bringing computational literacy to middle and high school students. Founded on Seymour Papert’s constructionist learning model and developed over nearly two decades, there is compelling evidence that game construction can increase confidence and build capacity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This project is a research-based challenge to the by now widely questioned but surprisingly persistent presumption that students in today's classrooms are all by default “digitally native” and that those “digitally native” children are learning just by playing digital games. Through a survey of 60+ students at a largely immigrant middle school in Toronto, Canada, we present some important updates on youth’s media and technology competence and its relationship to baseline knowledge of computer programming and performance in a computational literacy game-based curriculum.