Designing for Wide Walls with Contextualized Computing Education

Nice blog post from Mitchel.  The wide walls metaphor is an argument for contextualized computing education.  Computing is a literacy, and we have to offer a variety of genres and purposes to engage students.

But the most important lesson that I learned from Seymour isn’t captured in the low-floor/high-ceiling metaphor. For a more complete picture, we need to add an extra dimension: wide walls. It’s not enough to provide a single path from low floor to high ceiling; we need to provide wide walls so that kids can explore multiple pathways from floor to ceiling.Why are wide walls important? We know that kids will become most engaged, and learn the most, when they are working on projects that are personally meaningful to them. But no single project will be meaningful to all kids. So if we want to engage all kids—from many different backgrounds, with many different interests—we need to support a wide diversity of pathways and projects.

Source: Mitchel Resnick: Designing for Wide Walls | Design.blog