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This emerging technology report describes virtual environment interactions an approach for blending movement and computer programming as an embodied way to support girls in building computational thinking skills. The authors seek to understand how body syntonicity might enable young learners to bootstrap their intuitive knowledge in order to program a three-dimensional character to perform movements. We have gained insight into the desire for character realism. The lessons learned to date, as well as the challenges to integrating the physical and virtual and keeping the interactions rich are discussed.

We detail the design, implementation, and an initial evaluation of a virtual reality education and entertainment (edutainment) application called Virtual Environment Interactions (VEnvI). VEnvI is an application in which students learn computer science concepts through the process of choreographing movement for a virtual character using a fun and intuitive interface. In this exploratory study, 54 participants as part of a summer camp geared towards promoting participation of women in science and engineering programmatically crafted a dance performance for a virtual human. A subset of those students (16) participated in an immersive embodied interaction metaphor in VEnvI. In creating this metaphor that provides first-person, embodied experiences using self-avatars, we seek to facilitate engagement, excitement and interest in computational thinking. We qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated the extent to which the activities of the summer camp, programming the dance moves, and the embodied interaction within VEnvI facilitated students' edutainment, presence, interest, excitement, and engagement in computing, and the potential to alter their perceptions of computing and computer scientists. Results indicate that students enjoyed the experience and successfully engaged the virtual character in the immersive embodied interaction, thus exhibiting high telepresence and social presence. Students also showed increased interest and excitement regarding the computing field at the end of their summer camp experience using VEnvI.

Fifty-four middle school girls were a part of weeklong program geared towards encouraging young women in STEM careers. During a two-day computer science intervention, we introduced students to our VEnvI software where students program virtual characters to perform choreography. During this time, students were introduced programming concepts: sequencing, loops, and variables. They also spent time performing to learn some of the movements in VEnvI and discussed different aspects of the VEnvI software design including motion capture & Unity 3D Development. The latter conversations were couched in relation to being a computer scientist. Data were collected from the students on the first day of the camp as well as at the end of the second day. Each student was given a piece of paper that only contained a code corresponding to her. The instructions were to write, "What do computer scientists do?" on one side of the page, and to draw a picture of a computer scientist on the other side. Our findings suggest that, at least in the short term, this type of intervention can impact students' perceptions of computer science as well as broaden their perspectives of computer scientists. More students drew female computer scientists in the post-test and showed computer scientists working in teams rather than alone. Further, students' ideas of what computer scientists "do" shifted from fixing computers and making websites to creating, designing, and inventing with computers.

n this paper, we introduce an embodied pedagogical approach for learning computational concepts, utilizing computational practices, and developing computational perspectives. During a five-week pilot, a group of students spent after-school time learning the basic elements of dance and then using them to program three-dimensional characters that could perform. Throughout the pilot, we found students consistently standing up in front of their computers and using their bodies to think through the actuation of their characters. Preliminary results suggest that designing a virtual-physical dance performance is a motivating and engaging social context in which to introduce students, especially girls, to alternative applications in computing.