Boxer Salon 2022

Continuing the Salon des Refusés and Convivial Computing Salon tracks from previous years, the Committee is pleased to announce a Boxer-themed workshop to be hosted at <Programming> 2022.

Boxer, initiated by Andy diSessa and Hal Abelson as a breakaway from the Logo programming group at MIT in 1978, is arguably the world’s greatest success in creating a malleable, reconstructible, convivial computing medium. Attested through many years of successful deployments in schools throughout the 80s and 90s, Boxer was the subject of three major NSF grants and a landmark text, Changing Minds, written by Andy DiSessa in 2000, setting out a cultural manifesto for two-way computational literacies mediated by reconstructible media.

The Boxer Reconstruction Project, directed by the diSessa Family Foundation, for the last few years has been steadily modernising and stabilising the Boxer codebase to run on modern systems, leading to Boxer Sunrise at https://boxer-project.github.io/.

Accepted Contributions

Call for Papers/Posters/Demonstrations/Reflections

Our workshop invites anyone who has been involved with Boxer over the years, or anyone who takes an interest in its future evolution, to submit short or long papers, videos, reflections, or any other kind of artefact addressing any of the following:

• Experiences in the classroom using Boxer as a vehicle for building scientific understanding

• Experiences as part of the Boxer ecosystem, as producers, consumers, or mediators of Boxer microworlds or implementation patterns

• Experiences as implementors of Boxer, and reflections on its impact on their programming philosophy or design tastes over the years

• Reflections on Boxer’s model of naive realism, and its relation to similar systems under development today

• Reflections on the nature of computational literacy, and its convivial idiom - how to bring the cultures of creators and consumers closer together through reconstructible media such as Boxer

• Reflections on what you find most important or interesting about Boxer as a system, or about the larger social/psychological framings of Boxer work?

If your submission takes the form of a paper and you would like it to appear in the conference post-proceedings, please adhere to the ACM Format:

Formatting your paper in LaTeX: please use the acmart package v1.77 or newer. Please use the ‘sigconf’ style by using the following LaTeX class configuration: \documentclass[sigconf,screen]{acmart}

Formatting your paper in Word: please download the template from the ACM format site. Please use the ‘sigconf’ style by selecting the right template.