Related papers: Empowering Kids to Create and Share Programmable M…
In this paper, I describe a platform for sharing programmable media on the web called ScratchR. As the backbone of an on-line community of creative learners, ScratchR will give members access to an audience and inspirational ideas from each…
Scratch is a programming environment and an online community where young people can create, share, learn, and communicate. In collaboration with the Scratch Team at MIT, we created a longitudinal dataset of public activity in the Scratch…
In this paper, we present Scratch Community Blocks, a new system that enables children to programmatically access, analyze, and visualize data about their participation in Scratch, an online community for learning computer programming. At…
Although socializing is a powerful driver of youth engagement online, platforms struggle to leverage engagement to promote learning. We seek to understand this dynamic using a multi-stage analysis of over 14,000 comments on Scratch, an…
In this paper we describe the ways participants of the Scratch online community, primarily young people, engage in remixing of each others' shared animations, games, and interactive projects. In particular, we try to answer the following…
Through a mixed-method analysis of data from Scratch, we examine how novices learn to program with simple data structures by using community-produced learning resources. First, we present a qualitative study that describes how…
Theorists and advocates of "remixing" have suggested that appropriation can act as a pathway for learning. We test this theory quantitatively using data from more than 2.4 million multimedia programming projects shared by more than 1…
Defining abstract algorithmic structures like functions and variables using self-made tangibles can enhance the usability and affordability of the tangible programming experience by maintaining the input modality and physical interaction…
We developed a website for kids where they can share new as well as remixed animations and games, e.g., interactive music videos, which they created on their smartphones or tablets using a visual "LEGO-style" programming environment called…
Learning to code, and more broadly, learning about computer science is a growing field of activity and research. Under the label of computational thinking, computational concepts are increasingly used as cognitive tools in many subject…
This paper presents a educational workshop in Scratch that is proposed for the active participation of undergraduate students in contexts of Artificial Intelligence. The main objective of the activity is to demystify the complexity of…
Societal matters like the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement influence software engineering, as the recent debate on replacing certain discriminatory terms such as whitelist/blacklist has shown. Identifying relevant and trending societal…
Curiosity-driven learning has shown significant positive effects on students' learning experiences and outcomes. But despite this importance, reports show that children lack this skill, especially in formal educational settings. To address…
Block-based programming environments such as Scratch are an essential entry point to computer science. In order to create an effective learning environment that has the potential to address the gender imbalance in computer science, it is…
Social robots are increasingly introduced into children's lives as educational and social companions, yet little is known about how these products might best be introduced to their environments. The emergence of the "unboxing" phenomenon in…
Although informal online learning communities have proliferated over the last two decades, a fundamental question remains: What are the users of these communities expected to learn? Guided by the work of Etienne Wenger on communities of…
Promoting creativity is considered an important goal of education, but creativity is notoriously hard to measure.In this paper, we make the journey fromdefining a formal measure of creativity that is efficientlycomputable to applying the…
As pervasive data collection and powerful algorithms increasingly shape children's experience of the world and each other, their ability to interrogate computational algorithms has become crucially important. A growing body of work has…
Nowadays, technology has become dominant in the daily lives of most people around the world. From children to older people, technology is present, helping in the most diverse daily tasks and allowing accessibility. However, many times these…
Creative coding platforms like Scratch have democratized programming for children, yet translating imaginative ideas into functional code remains a significant hurdle for many young learners. While AI copilots assist adult programmers, few…