| With the emergence of STEM-centric educational strategies, particularly those that promote what is called "computational thinking", computer programming is being marketed as a critical skill with a fervour not seen since the 1980s. Products such as the Raspberry Pi computer and Arduino circuit board are very deliberately marketed as DIY computing tools, inheritors of the legacy left by companies such as Commodore and Tandy Corporation. At the same time, new programming languages and systems have emerged that very much target new learners, with MIT's Scratch system being foremost among them.;The present study traces the historical roots of DIY computing by focusing on the concept of interactivity, and especially interactive forms of digital gaming. Interactivity may take a variety of forms, but due to certain forces discussed in this study, a particularly limiting type of interactivity was picked up and popularized via the earliest personal computers. This model sharply divides the roles of programmer and user, and reduces the user largely to a supplier of data for pre-existing programs and games.;This study will discuss and analyze a variant form of interactive computing that emerged in the late 1970s, and is typically known as the Interactive Programming System (IPS). In an IPS, developers and users occupy the same environment, thus giving users virtually full access to code. The IPS model, moreover, encourages all users to develop code "ecosystems", which may contain variables, functions, objects, and relationships between them all. For various reasons, IPSs only had limited success, but this study will advocate for their continued use by presenting a simple IPS developed by the author of this thesis called Hail-Workshop. Designed as a platform for text-based games, Hail-Workshop allows users to develop such games in piecemeal fashion, and thus treats game players the same as game developers. |
