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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 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…
Online programming communities provide a space for novices to engage with computing concepts, allowing them to learn and develop computing skills using user-generated projects. However, the lack of structured guidance in the informal…
Generative AI enables students to produce plausible code quickly. Producing working code is therefore no longer a reliable indicator of understanding. This is particularly problematic in non-computer-science programmes, where time…
As NLP research attracts public attention and excitement, it becomes increasingly important for it to be accessible to a broad audience. As the research community works to democratize NLP, it remains unclear whether beginners to the field…
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, 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…
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…
Recent developments in deep learning have resulted in code-generation models that produce source code from natural language and code-based prompts with high accuracy. This is likely to have profound effects in the classroom, where novices…
Creativity, i.e., the process of generating and developing fresh and original ideas or products that are useful or effective, is a valuable skill in a variety of domains. Creativity is called an essential 21st-century skill that should be…
Curiosity is a vital metacognitive skill in educational contexts. Yet, little is known about how social factors influence curiosity in group work. We argue that curiosity is evoked not only through individual, but also interpersonal…
Open-ended programming increases students' motivation by allowing them to solve authentic problems and connect programming to their own interests. However, such open-ended projects are also challenging, as they often encourage students to…
Blocks-based programming has become the lingua franca for introductory coding. Studies have found that experience with blocks-based programming can help beginners learn more traditional text-based languages. We explore how blocks…
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…
This article reflects on the first eight months of existence of the Scratch Online Community by discussing the design rationale and learning theories underlying Scratch and its website.
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…
Learning structural information from observational data is central to producing new knowledge outside the training corpus. This holds for mechanistic understanding in scientific discovery as well as flexible test-time compositional…
In a real-world social network, weak ties (reflecting low-intensity, infrequent interactions) act as bridges and connect people to different social circles, giving them access to diverse information and opportunities that are not available…
Novice programmers experience emotional difficulties in informal online learning environments, where confusion and frustration can hinder motivation and learning outcomes. This study investigates novice programmers' emotional experiences in…
Websites are frequently used by programmers to support the development process. This paper investigates programmer-Web interactions when coding, and combines observations of behaviour with assessments of the resulting source code. We report…