Children's Participation in a Media Content

Creation Community: Israeli Learners in a

Scratch Programming Environment

Ina BlauDepartment of

Education & Psychology,

Chais Research Center, OUI

Oren ZuckermanIDC Herzliya

School of Communications

Andrés Monroy-HernándezMIT Media Lab

Scratch: Online Community of Interactive Projects

• Browse

• View projects

• Download

Scratch: Online Community of Interactive Projects

Project creation:

• Create

• Share

• Remix

Scratch: Online Community of Interactive Projects

Social participation:

• Write comments

• Add friends

• Add to galleries

• Mark as love-it

• Add to favorites

Background 1

• Scratch - constructionist, social environment (Papert, 1980; Resnick, 2007 )

• Participation patterns (Jenkins, 2006; Monroy-Hernández & Resnick, 2008)

Background 2

• Motivation for contribution (Rafaeli & Ariel, 2008; Rafaeli, Raban & Ravid, 2007)

• Uses and gratification (Rubin, 1994)

Study hypotheses

1. Project creation and social participation measures would

not correlate

2. Individual investment in the community would positively

correlate with community feedback both on a user and a

project level

3. There would be no significant gender differences in

participation patterns and project complexity

Method: Participants

65 Israeli Scratch users,

mostly elementary school students

35 girls (53.8%)

Age range: 9-17

(Mean: 11.5)

(Median: 11)

Method: Instrument and Procedure

• Israeli Scratch online community logs in July, 2008

• Project creation: number of original and remixed projects per user

• Social participation: number of comments, friends, favorites, posting in galleries, and "love-its" rating

• Project complexity: mean of a project’s scripts and sprites

Community feedback: • User level: number of participants defined a user as their friend

• Project level: User's projects viewed, commented, marked-as-favorite, downloaded, remixed, or marked-as-love-it

Projects created by Israeli Scratch community(July 2008)

0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1400

1600

1800

Users

Nu

mb

er

of

pro

jec

ts

80% / 17% / 3%

<100 / >100 / >1000

Results - Individual investment

• Project creation: Medium-high correlations within different measures of project participation investment (original projects, remixed projects)

• Social participation: Medium-high correlations between most of social participation measures (favorites, friends, galleries, comments, love-its)

• As hypothesized, measures of the project creation are not correlated with social participation

• Suggestion: Different participation patterns may fulfill different Scratch users' needs (future research needed)

Results: Individual investment and community feedback – in the user level

• As hypothesized, all participants received community feedback (in the form of befriended)

• 7 predictors (number of views, downloads, user's friends, galleries a user

participated in, comments made, favorites and "love-its" added to other projects)

accounted for 81.1% of variance in community feedback

Results: Individual investment and community feedback – in the project level

• As hypothesized: project feedback positively correlates with social-participators investment

• Opposite to the hypothesis: project feedback negatively correlates with project-creation investment

• It seems that social participants give feedback to projects of their friends.

Results: Gender

• No statistically significant gender differences are found in participation patterns or project complexity.

• It seems that Scratch opens similar possibilities to both genders in programming, learning and participation.

Conclusion

• Project creators and social participators are different users

• Community feedback:– In the user level: all participants receive feedback - as befriended – In the project level: a project feedback positively correlates with

social participation investment, but negatively correlates with project creation investment

=> it seems feedback based on friendship and not project quality

• No gender differences

Motivation for participation?

Design for participation?