Stories children write while coding: a cross-disciplinary approach for the primary classroom

Abstract

This paper presents research on how children aged 5–11 can create stories through computer programming (coding). A novel ‘Story-Writing-Coding’ engine is introduced where children realise their imagined stories through code that results in animations representing their stories. Analysis of how they manipulated code to represent story meaning is presented, together with a hypothetical model of the strategies they used in composition. Using the context of multimodal literacy, it is argued that coding can be thought of as a form of literacy and that taking this perspective may lead to benefits for children as both literacy learners and also learners of computer programming. While the authors have worked with 103 children, the results presented in this paper are drawn from an in-depth analysis of 20 stories with associated code together with observations by the authors. It was found that children are able to manipulate code creatively to obtain meaningful stories and successfully use the modes of print, static and moving images.