Can The Sims Make Programming Cool Again?

A new initiative aims to combine EA's popular cyber-folk with basic computer-programming instruction, to snag the attention of U.S. youth

by Reena Jana

"Walk into a middle school classroom and ask 'Who wants to be a computer programmer?' and hardly any hands go up," says Caitlin Kelleher, a post-doctoral researcher in Computer Science & Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. Delivered from the stage in a crowded hotel ballroom, her words sound like the beginning of a joke.

But Kelleher's point is anything but funny. While the number of computer-science grads in India and China is on the rise, the U.S. has seen a 50% drop in CS college majors between 2000 and 2005 (according to a May, 2005, UCLA study), casting doubt over whether the U.S. will continue to be an innovation leader in the global economy.

Kelleher's venue was the Serious Games Summit, held Oct. 30-31 in Washington, D.C. It's an annual gathering of game designers and developers who are joined in researching how their "entertainment" medium can be leveraged as a training tool in areas ranging from the military to health care, education, activism, and the corporate world.

That's Edu-tainment

But, according to Kelleher, the situation isn't quite as grim as it might appear. "Walk into the same classroom and ask, 'Who wants to make Pixar movies?' and it's a different story," Kelleher continues, delivering the punch-line that offers a possible solution: Entice kids to study programming by focusing on the "products" of computer science that they're already familiar with—animated movies, video games, and social-networking sites—rather than the process of writing code. Not only does this make the discipline seem less tedious, it gives programming an element of cool.

Entertainment meets academics—this is the thinking behind Kelleher's research. She's part of a team working with CMU professor Randy Pausch on the next generation of Alice—software designed to introduce children to programming through simple exercises in digital animation. In development since the mid-1990s, the tool is based on early 3D-modeling software. Kelleher shows the current versions of Alice, one for middle and high school students and a more involved one for college students. At the moment, they have rather clunky onscreen graphics, though that will soon change.

She shares the podium with Steve Seabolt, vice-president of university and marketing education at Electronic Arts (ERTS), who's there to announce that EA is pouring $300,000 into the Alice project. Moreover, it has licensed the software from the popular Sims franchise, which has sold 70 million copies, to CMU, allowing the researchers to jazz up the Alice visuals and user experience.

Smart Blocks

Alice isn't the first effort to make computer programming fun for kids. Starting in the 1960s, MIT researchers began developing the children's programming language, LOGO. Now the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT's Media Lab is developing The Scratch Project, in collaboration with the KIDS research group at UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies.

The Scratch Project's toolkit (based on open-source programming language Squeak) allows kids to create animations and computer games by selecting parameters from a point-and-click menu. The tool should be available for public release by the end of 2006.

Researchers at the Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten project also worked with Danish toymaker Lego to create "programmable bricks," or building blocks equipped with sensors and other chip-driven tools. The research led to Lego's Mindstorms robot-building kits and the PicoCricket, now used by educators and inventors (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/7/06, "Invasion of the DIY Robots").

Free Mickey

In the commercial arena, Massachusetts-based programmer Igor Kholodv released c-jump, an old-school board game for kids 11 and older that requires players to use programming commands such as "if (x = =1)…" to advance their game pieces.