Children's Participation in a Media Content Creation Community: Israeli Learners in a Scratch Programming Environment

1
Children's Participation in a Media Content
Creation Community Israeli Learners in a
Scratch Programming Environment

• Ina Blau
• Department of Education Psychology,
• Chais Research Center, OUI

Oren Zuckerman IDC Herzliya School of
Communications
Andrés Monroy-Hernández MIT Media Lab
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Scratch Online Community of Interactive Projects

• Browse
• View projects
• Download

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Scratch Online Community of Interactive Projects

• Project creation
• Create
• Share
• Remix

4
Scratch Online Community of Interactive Projects

• Social participation
• Write comments
• Add friends
• Add to galleries
• Mark as love-it
• Add to favorites

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Background 1

• Scratch - constructionist, social environment
• (Papert, 1980 Resnick, 2007 )?
• Participation patterns
• (Jenkins, 2006 Monroy-Hernández Resnick,
  2008)?

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Background 2

• Motivation for contribution
• (Rafaeli Ariel, 2008 Rafaeli, Raban Ravid,
  2007)?
• Uses and gratification (Rubin, 1994)?

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Study hypotheses

• Project creation and social participation
  measures would not correlate
• Individual investment in the community would
  positively correlate with community feedback both
  on a user and a project level
• There would be no significant gender differences
  in participation patterns and project complexity

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Method Participants
65 Israeli Scratch users, mostly elementary
school students 35 girls (53.8) Age range 9-17
(Mean 11.5)? (Median 11)

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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 projects 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

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Projects created by Israeli Scratch
community(July 2008)
80 / 17 / 3
lt100 / gt100 / gt1000
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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)?

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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

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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.

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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.

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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
• gt it seems feedback based on friendship and
  not project quality
• No gender differences

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Motivation for participation?Design for
participation?