ABSTRACT
Most research in primary and secondary computing education has focused on understanding learners within formal classroom communities, leaving aside the growing number of promising informal online programming communities where young learners contribute, comment, and collaborate on programs. In this paper, we examined trends in computational participation in Scratch, an online community with over 1 million registered youth designers primarily 11-18 years of age. Drawing on a random sample of 5,000 youth programmers and their activities over three months in early 2012, we examined the quantity of programming concepts used in projects in relation to level of participation, gender, and account age of Scratch programmers. Latent class analyses revealed four unique groups of programmers. While there was no significant link between level of online participation, ranging from low to high, and level of programming sophistication, the exception was a small group of highly engaged users who were most likely to use more complex programming concepts. Groups who only used few of the more sophisticated programming concepts, such as Booleans, variables and operators, were identified as Scratch users new to the site and girls. In the discussion we address the challenges of analyzing young learners' programming in informal online communities and opportunities for designing more equitable computational participation.
- Y. Benkler. The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Berland, and V. R. Lee. Collaborative strategic board games as a site for distributed computational thinking. International Journal of Game-Based Learning 1(2): 65--81, 2011.Google ScholarCross Ref
- K. Brennan. Best of both worlds: Issues of structure and agency in computational creation, in and out of school. Unpublished dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2013. Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. Brennan, Audience in the service of learning: How kids negotiate attention in an online community of interactive media designers. Learning, Media, and Technology. In press.Google Scholar
- K. Brennan and M. Resnick. Imagining, creating, playing, sharing, reflecting: How online community supports young people as designers of interactive media. In N. Lavigne and C. Mouza (Eds.), Emerging Technologies for the Classroom: A Learning Sciences Perspective, 5--17, 2013.Google Scholar
- K. Brennan and M. Resnick. New frameworks for studying and assessing the development of computational thinking. Paper presented at annual American Educational Research Association meeting, Vancouver, BC, Canada, April 2012.Google Scholar
- A. S. Bruckman. MOOSE Crossing: Construction, community, and learning in a networked virtual world for kids. Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Bruckman. Situated support for learning: Storm's weekend with Rachael. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 9(3): 329--372, 2000.Google ScholarCross Ref
- C. C. Ching, and Y. B. Kafai. Peer pedagogy: Student collaboration and reflection in a learning-through-design project. The Teachers College Record, 110(12): 2601--2632, 2008.Google ScholarCross Ref
- J. Denner, L. Werner, and E. Ortiz. Computer games created by middle school girls: Can they be used to measure understanding of computer science concepts? Computers & Education, 58(1), 240--249: 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. L. Fadjo. Developing computational thinking through grounded embodied cognition. Unpublished dissertation. Columbia University, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. A. Fields, M. Giang, and Y. B. Kafai. Understanding collaborative practices in the Scratch online community: Patterns of participation among youth designers. In N. Rummel, M. Kapur, M. Nathan, & S. Puntambekar (Eds), To see the world and a grain of sand: Learning across levels of space, time, and scale: CSCL 2013 Conference Proceedings, Volume 1, Full Papers & Symposia. International Society of the Learning Sciences: Madison, WI, 200--207, 2013.Google Scholar
- D. A. Fields, & H. T. Martin. Macro data for micro learning: Developing FUN! for automated assessment of computational thinking in Scratch. Proposal {funded}. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation grant #1319938, 2013.Google Scholar
- D. A. Fields, V. Vasudevan, and Y. B. Kafai, Y. B. The programmers' collective: Connecting collaboration and computation in a high school Scratch mashup coding workshop. In J. L. Polman, E. A. Kyza, D. K. O'Neill, I. Tabak, W. R. Penuel, A. S. Jurow, A. S., K. O'Connor, T. Lee and L. D'Amico (Eds.). Learning and Becoming in Practice: The International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2014, Volume 1. Boulder, CO: International Society of the Learning Sciences, pp. 855--862, 2014.Google Scholar
- N. Forsgren Velasquez, D. A. Fields, D. Olsen, H. T. Martin, A. Strommer, M. C. Sheperd, and Y. B. Kafai. Novice programmers talking about projects: What automated text analysis reveals about online Scratch users' comments. In the Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). Waikoloa, Hawaii. IEEE, December 2013. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. M. Grimes and D. A. Fields. Kids online: A new research agenda for understanding social networking forums. New York. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Available online at http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/reports-38.html. 2012.Google Scholar
- S. Grover and R. Pea. Computational Thinking in K--12 A Review of the State of the Field. Educational Researcher, 42(1): 38--43, 2013.Google ScholarCross Ref
- J. Hagenaars and A. McCutcheon (Eds). Applied Latent Class Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
- K. Healy and A. Schussman. The ecology of Open-Source software development. Working paper available at: opensource.mit.edu/papers/healyschussman.pdf (Accessed November 21, 2011), 2003.Google Scholar
- M. Ito, S. Baumer, M. Bittanti, d. boyd, R. Cody, B. Herr, H. A. Horst, P. G. Lange, D. Mahendran, K. Martinez, C. J. Pascoe, D. Perkel, L. Robinson, C. Sims and L. Tripp. Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out: Living and learning with new media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. B. Kafai. Minds in play: Computer game design as a context for children's learning. New York, New York: Routledge, 1995. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. B. Kafai and Q. Burke. Connected code: Why children need to learn programming. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. B. Kafai and D. A. Fields. Connecting play: Understanding multimodal participation in virtual worlds. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Multimodal interaction (ICMI '12). ACM, New York, New York, USA, 265--272, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. B. Kafai and D. A. Fields. Connected Play: Tweens in a Virtual World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2013. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. B. Kafai, D. A. Fields and W. Q. Burke. Entering the clubhouse: Case studies of young programmers joining the online Scratch communities. Journal of Organizational and End-User Computing, 22(2): 21--35, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. B. Kafai, D. A. Fields, R. Roque, W. Q. Burke and A. Monroy-Hernández. Collaborative agency in youth online and offline creative production in Scratch. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning, 7(2): 63--87, 2012.Google Scholar
- C. Kelleher and R. Pausch. Using storytelling to motivate programming. Communications of the ACM, 50(7): 58--64, 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. H. Maloney, K. Peppler, Y. B. Kafai, M. Resnick and N. Rusk. Programming by choice: Urban youth learning programming with scratch. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 40(1): 367--371, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Margolis, R. Estrella, J. Goode, J. Holme and K. Nao. Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press., 2008 Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Margolis and A. Fisher. Unlocking the Clubhouse. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002.Google Scholar
- A. Monroy-Hernandez. Designing for remixing: Supporting an online community of amateur creators. Unpublished dissertation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 2012.Google Scholar
- B. Muthen. Statistical and substantive checking in growth mixture modeling. Retrieved January 2007 from http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/muthen/full_paper_list.h, 2002.Google Scholar
- B. Muthen and L. Muthen. Integrating person-centered and variable-centered analyses: Growth mixture modeling with latent trajectory classes. Alcohol Clinical Experimental Research, 24(6): 882--891, 2001.Google ScholarCross Ref
- L. Porter, M. Guzdial, C. McDowell and B. Simon. Success in introductory programming: what works? Communications of ACM, 56(8): 34--36, 2013. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Resnick, J. Maloney, A. M. Hernández, N. Rusk, E. Eastmond, K. Brennan, A. D. Millner, E. Rosenbaum, J. Silver, B. Silverman and Y. B. Kafai. Scratch: Programming for everyone. Communications of the ACM, 52(11): 60--67, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Robbins, J. Rountree, and N. Rountree. Learning and Teaching Programming: A Review and Discussion. Computer Science Education, 13(2): 137--72, 2003.Google Scholar
- J. L. Siegel, R. Roque, D. Low, Y. B. Kafai and D. A. Fields. Understanding the creative and collaborative literacy practices in the Scratch online community: A role playing case study. Paper presented at the 33rd Annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum, Philadelphia, PA, February 2012.Google Scholar
- E. Soloway and J. Spohrer. Empirical studies of novice programmers. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1990.Google Scholar
- J. Wing. Computational Thinking. Communications of the ACM, 49 (3): 33--35, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Yardi and A. Bruckman. What is computing? Bridging the gap between teenagers' perceptions and graduate students' experiences. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Computing Education Research. ACM, Atlanta, GA, 39--50, 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Programming in the wild: trends in youth computational participation in the online scratch community
Recommendations
“I have a tutorial for this”: the language of online peer support in the scratch programming community
IDC '15: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Interaction Design and ChildrenMillions of kids are visiting and communicating in online sites and communities. While some concerns have been raised unsupervised and potentially harmful communication, a number of studies have identified great potential in kids' online talk, ...
Youth Computational Participation in the Wild: Understanding Experience and Equity in Participating and Programming in the Online Scratch Community
Special Issue on Learning AnalyticsMost research in primary and secondary computing education has focused on understanding learners within formal classroom communities, leaving aside the growing number of promising informal online programming communities where young users contribute, ...
A tool for help or harm? How associations between social networking use, social support, and mental health differ for sexual minority and heterosexual youth
Although use of social networking sites has been linked to both positive and negative changes in young people's mental health, it is likely that these contributions may vary based on users' motivations and social status. For sexual minority youth, for ...
Comments