Much of the current games research focuses on how learning to play games can engage players in various valuable practices relevant to and supportive of school learning and literacies (see Gee, 2003). We contend that learning to design games can engage youth in an equally wide range of valuable practices, all of which are complexly intertwined ecologies that help youth to coordinate multiple activities and types of meaning-making systems (Kafai, 2006a). We call this intermix of technology and gaming practices gaming fluencies because youth can become fluent not only in game design but also in the creative, critical, and technical aspects of working with new media. We’re using game production as a way to promote gaming literacy in the broadest sense as well as to enhance technology fluency, particularly among disadvantaged youth (Kafai, Peppler, & Chiu, 2007). Our approach of gaming fluencies aligns with work in the constructionist tradition (Kafai, 2006b; Papert, 1980) that proposes pedagogies to promote technology fluency and further argues that video games are a form of twenty-first-century art (Mitchell & Clarke, 2003).

To illustrate our view on gaming fluencies, we examine the game artifacts that were designed in a place called the Computer Clubhouse, a community technology center located in South Los Angeles (Kafai, Peppler, & Chapman, 2009). Youth in this clubhouse had access to a wide range of design tools, but our attention focuses particularly on their use of Scratch (Resnick et al., 2009), a media-rich software design environment that we introduced beginning in 2005 as part of a larger research project. During the following two years, we documented daily design work in field notes and archived all Scratch projects. Our analyses will focus on an archive of Scratch projects created over a two-year period by clubhouse members. A large percentage of these designs were games that imitated standard game genres or were interactive narratives and are the subject of this chapter (more than 68 percent of the total archive, n = 430) (Peppler & Kafai, 2010). Scratch games were categorized in a wide range of genres, including sports, adventure, and racing games, but also included mazes or puzzles.

Learning sciences researchers are unified by their deep commitment to radically transform learning – away from the transmission and acquisition style associated with lectures and quizzes, to a more active, participatory learning style. Perhaps the first scholar to realize that computers provided schools with an opportunity to do so was Seymour Papert, who created the now-famous Logo programming language. Papert, who received two doctorates in mathematics, expanded his career by studying cognitive development with Jean Piaget, the founder of constructivism – one of the theoretical foundations of today's learning sciences. After leaving Piaget's lab in Switzerland, Papert took a faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he cofounded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Marvin Minsky. In the 1970s, Papert began to expand the psychological insights of Piaget's constructivism into pedagogical principles, providing a template that later influenced many learning sciences researchers.

When Papert's book Mindstorms was published in 1980 the term constructionism had yet to be coined. In this book and subsequent publications he advanced a theory of learning, teaching, and design. Many took the notion of “children, computers and powerful ideas” (to quote the subtitle of his book) as a rather simplistic version of Piagetian discovery learning with the Logo programming language when, in fact, the opposite applied. Constructionism is not constructivism, as Piaget never intended his theory of knowledge development to be a theory of learning and teaching; nor is constructionist learning simply discovery learning and thus opposed to any forms of instruction; and last, in constructionism, people and not computers are seen as the driving force for educational change.