Prior Work on RAPUNSEL

RAPUNSEL (http://mrl.nyu.edu/rapunsel) is an on-going three-year NSF-funded research project in which we are building a software environment aimed at introducing programming to middle school children through a socially engaging networked game. Similar to the proposal at hand, the RAPUNSEL project makes use of the pervasive capabilities of Java applets on the World-Wide Web to model an accessible socially interactive world and its inhabitants. Within this world, children benefit from the ability to learn concepts through exploration. The project was motivated by a desire to improve all children's, especially disadvantaged children's, overall aptitude and attitude toward science, math, and technology. The basic conceit of the game world is that children adopt interactive animated characters that can engage in adventures within the game. These characters are actually programmable multi-threaded bots. In the course of playing the game, children learn progressively more advanced programming concepts, which they can apply to allow their characters to engage the on-line world, and other characters in the world, in interesting ways.

One of the express purposes of the RAPUNSEL project is to engage children who are currently underrepresented in programming, such as girls, through an approach which facilitates peer to peer interaction, sharing, and instant feedback.