Success Story out of the ED/IES SBIR Program: Story Mode for Teaching Cross-Curricular Coding Projects

Product: In previous R&D, the developers created codeSpark Academy, a game that employs a visual and block-based approach with puzzles to teach coding skills to students ages 5 to 9 years old. codeSpark Academy is in widespread use in and out of schools around the world. In the ED/IES SBIR projects, the developer created a new learning game called Story Mode, with storytelling creative tools to engage students in learning to code. The pretend-play scenarios include characters, storylines, and incentives to make connections to learning goals more explicit. In the game, students create and upload photographic backgrounds to customize gameplay by representing people, locations, and events at their own school or throughout history. Students can create their own characters from history, from real life, or from their imagination — and record voices to bring them to life.

Research and Development
During Phase I, the team developed a prototype of Story Mode, a game where children create digital stories, and in the process, learn the basics of coding. Pilot research at the end of Phase I with eight grade 1 and 2 classrooms over a one-week period demonstrated that the prototype functioned as planned, that teachers believed the fully developed game could be implemented within a classroom, and that students were engaged while playing the game prototype.

During Phase II, the team expanded the app to include more features, curriculum, and training to support teachers in integrating computational thinking and coding concepts across different lesson plans in English Language Arts. After development concluded, researchers conducted a pilot study to assess the feasibility and usability, fidelity of implementation, and the promise of Story Mode to increase children's coding and computational skills over a period of 9 weeks. The sample included 11 educators and 259 students, with six of the classes randomly assigned to use Story Mode and the other five to use business-as-usual activities. Teachers reported that students enjoyed and were highly engaged with Story Mode and developed important skills. Teachers agreed that the professional development, lesson plans, and the implementation of Story Mode were appropriate. Teachers offered constructive feedback regarding the time needed to implement the lessons and the length of individual lessons and the fast pace by which the lessons cover computational thinking concepts. Results also demonstrated that in a pre-and post-test test, students who used Story Mode improved on measures of computational thinking skills compared to students in the control group.

Path to Commercialization:
Since commercial launch in 2018, Story Mode has been used by more than 140K teachers and more than 7.7M students, with more than 460K total classroom accounts registered on the codeSpark teacher dashboard. In May 2021, codeSpark was acquired by Homer Learning to allow for greater scale and further development of its learning games. Between October 2021 and October 2022, children engaged in over 14.5M home sessions and almost 7M school sessions and created over 1.5M games and stories in the app on a monthly basis.

Awards

• 2022, July — ED/IES SBIR awardee codeSpark won a 2022 SBIR Tibbets Award from the Small Business Administration among the more than 600 submissions. Read Here.

Follow On Funding:

• Identifying Young Children's Computational Thinking Processes in Visual Programming Environments Using Telemetry-Based Evidence Collection Methods (ED/IES R305A0190433)
• Teaching Computational Thinking to Prekindergarten Students in Underrepresented Communities (NSF 2122436) in partnership with RAND and National Head Start Association.