How social are Scratch learners? A comprehensive analysis of the Scratch platform for social...

FLOSSEdu workshop @ OSS 2016, Gothenburg

How social are Scratch learners?A comprehensive analysis of the Scratch platform for social

interactions

J. Moreno-Leon, Gregorio Robles, Marcos Roman-Gonzalez

[email protected], [email protected], [email protected]/Libresoft, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

FLOSSEdu workshop @ OSS 2016, Gothenburg, June 2nd 2016

J. Moreno-Leon, Gregorio Robles, Marcos Roman-Gonzalez How social are Scratch learners?


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Scratch

Visual programming language based on blocks

Designed for young learners

Massively used worldwide: 12 million users, 15 million projects

Website to share, study and remix projects, post comments orwork in teams

Social aspects of sw development of FLOSS movements

See https://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/


https://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/


Research question

RQ: How ’social’ is the Scratch community interms of number of comments, friends,

favorites and galleries?

Background picture: rebel-performance.com



Dataset

Scratch Research Data

Data from the Scratchonline community website

First five years of data,roughly 2007-2012

Core datasets, Text andCode datasets and ProjectAnalytics datasets

Core Dataset

1,056,951 users

1,928,699 projects

120,097 galleries

1,313,200 friends

1,041,387 favorites

7,788,414 project comments

Request access to the dataset at https://llk.media.mit.edu/scratch-data/


https://llk.media.mit.edu/scratch-data/


Results (I)

Figure: Distribution of users in terms of time (days) in the community.



Results (II)

Figure: Distribution of users in terms of number of published projects.



Results (III)

Figure: Distribution of users in terms of number of friends.



Results (IV)

Figure: Distribution of users in terms of number of favorites.



Results (V)

Figure: Distribution of users in terms of number of galleries created.



Results (VI)

Figure: Distribution of users in terms of number of comments posted inproject pages.



Results (VII)

Table: Social activities of users with at least 5 published projects.

Galleries Friends Favorited Comments

Mean 0.94 12.72 11.42 100.05Std 2.55 65.33 69.30 538.7510% 0 0 0 020% 0 0 0 030% 0 0 0 040% 0 0 0 250% 0 1 0 560% 0 2 1 1070% 1 4 3 2180% 1 8 7 4990% 3 21 19 161100% 160 4,281 6,721 31,669



Results (and VIII)

Table: Characteristics of projects in collaborative galleries and projectsnot in them.

Not in collab gallery In collab gallery

n 1,469,386 459,313Blocks 100.84 152.24Type of blocks 12.44 14.31Costumes 17.20 25.84Sounds 3.75 4.86Ugstrings 36.15 55.01



Limitations

Several aspects must be taken into account

Data from 2007-2012, old version of the Scratchwebsite (see Internet archive)

Since 2012, important modifications in thewebsite to enhance users’ social participation

Study limited to online activities. Other socialactions performed in offline contexts (helping apeer, working in teams) are out of the scope ofthe investigation.

Background picture: Robert Couse-Baker


http://web.archive.org/web/20080527194722/http://scratch.mit.edu/


Conclusions

The vast majority of Scratch users barely make use ofthe social capabilities offered by the website.

Medians of users who have published at least five projects:

1 friend5 comments0 galleries0 favorites

Background picture: flamingcow.co.uk



Future Work

1 Compare this level of activity with other social, codingcommunities (like Github).

2 Analyze the impact of social participation in the learning ofprogramming skills.

Adaptation of Dr. Scratch to measure computational thinkingskills with the information of the dataset. (Seehttp://drscratch.org)

3 Access to a new dataset with more recent information wouldallow to perform new investigations that could yield differentconclusions.

Background picture: Simon Cunningham


http://drscratch.org


How social are Scratch learners?A comprehensive analysis of the Scratch platform for social

interactions

J. Moreno-Leon, Gregorio Robles, Marcos Roman-Gonzalez

[email protected], [email protected], [email protected]/Libresoft, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

FLOSSEdu workshop @ OSS 2016, Gothenburg, June 2nd 2016


How social are Scratch learners? A comprehensive analysis of the Scratch platform for social...

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