Caitlin Kelleher
Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Washington University in St. Louis
email: ckelleher@cse.wustl.edu
office: 513 Lopata
I joined the faculty in the fall of 2007 after receiving my PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University where I worked with Randy Pausch. My research interests lie in Human-Computer Interaction and Computational Learning Environments. In particular, I am interested in creating programming environments that engage a broad spectrum of children.
As my thesis work, I created and evaluated a programming system for middle school girls called Storytelling Alice that presents programming as a means to the end of storytelling. Storytelling Alice includes high-level animations that enable users to program social interactions, a gallery of characters and scenery designed to spark story ideas, and a story-based tutorial. To evaluate the impact of storytelling support on girls’ motivation and learning, I compared girls’ experiences using Storytelling Alice and a version of Alice without storytelling support (Generic Alice). Results of the study suggest that girls are more motivated to learn programming using Storytelling Alice; study participants who used Storytelling Alice spent 42% more time programming and were more than three times as likely to sneak extra time to work on their programs as users of Generic Alice (16% of Generic Alice users and 51% of Storytelling Alice users snuck extra time).
Kelleher, C. Motivating Programming: Using storytelling to make computer programming attractive to middle school girls. PhD Dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science Technical Report CMU-CS-06-171.