Children as webmakers: designing a web editor for beginners

In this short paper, we describe the design of a new web editor for beginners called openHTML and our initial evaluation with children aged 10 and 11 in an after-school web-building workshop. Drawing on data from verbally administered surveys and participant observation, we identified three kinds of engagement with the workshop tasks: a homework orientation, an artistic orientation, and a social orientation. We describe the kinds of scaffolding that the children needed to complete their web pages, the places where they struggled, and translate these observations into implications for the design of a web editor for children.