Hi Katie,

Sorry for the delayed response - Maggie (from the research team) will also respond to this. We are interested in all of the AMAYS participants increasing their interest in and skills surrounding computing to a certain extent, but due to the fluid nature of the after school program, and to our intentionally flexible design, which is meant to increase agency and choice, outcomes are going to vary quite a bit among treatment group participants. We are hoping that combined qual and quant data will help us to provide an accurate depiction of what took place during our rollout year.

Just to follow up on this before Maggie responds, I would also be interested to know more about you you're thinking about the impact of your program, like specifically what outcomes you are expecting to be able to have a measureable impact on. Even if you don't have comprehensive measures of everything or a plan to measure them, I'd still like to know how you conceptualize a theory of action for your program.

Hi Alex - Very briefly, we are looking at gains in participants’ computational thinking (based on Brennan and Resnick’s 2012 article and Yadav’s work) and some other 21st century skills as measured by a CT quiz, performance based evaluation, and analysis of student artifacts. We are also looking at gains in participants’ self-efficacy and interest in STEM/ICT. We are using mixed methods for data collection and analysis for that including surveys, interviews, observations, and participant observer reflections. As for impact, we hope to provide a model for and contribute to the literature on providing accessible CS learning experiences in diverse informal environments (i.e., after school programs), leaving a curriculum and an approach for continuing with informal CS learning within the large after school program where this project took place, and more broadly, expanding the number and diversity of students who get access to these type of STEM/ICT activities/experiences with a particular focus on those who are underrepresented.

Hi Irene, Jonathan (Jake) will reply to this as well. Activities included: 1) Guided instruction leading to the creation of pre-designed apps using MIT's App Inventor. These were step-by-step instructions for using app inventor to build apps that we found from existing curricula and then adapted for our project and context. 2) More lightly guided problem-based tasks that allow students to tweak, troubleshoot, or remix existing apps. Once students became more comfortable with the app building interface, they began to play and express themselves more - especially through remix. Some were  interested in creating remixed apps around pop-music, pop culture (sports) and games. 3) Creating their own apps from scratch. Due to time and attendance limitations, most of these did not make it past the design phase, but this is where we noticed that students were beginning to truly express themselves through design and in some cases, code. If we extend AMAYS, this will be one of the aspects on which we will put particular focus.

Hi Irene, Thanks for the question! To elaborate on Brendan's reply, the students worked individually, but it was interesting to watch how students occupied various roles within the different sites. Some students worked collaboratively with others. Other students became tech support/troubleshooting resources for their peers. Because these apps were, in a way, public artifacts, we noticed that the students' work sometimes influenced others' work. And certainly, some students gravitated more to the design aspects of the project, and others were more interested in the coding. The dynamics are interesting, and we should be able to present more detail as we move through our data analysis.