Children's Participation in a Media Content Creation Community: Israeli Learners in a Scratch Programming Environment
Ina Blau, Oren Zuckerman, Andrés Monroy‐Hernández, Sammy Ofer · 2009
Scratch is a programmable media tool and online community that enables children to create, share, and remix interactive projects, and socially participate in the community by writing comments, giving ratings, adding members as friends and so forth. This study examined the learning community of Israeli Scratch users. We investigated (1) participation patterns (project creation vs. social participation), (2) the relationship between individual investment and community feedback (both on a user and a project level), and (3) gender differences in participation patterns and project complexity. The findings support our hypotheses, showing that: (1) different participation patterns are not correlated. Project creators and social participators are different users - suggesting that different participation patterns fulfill different user needs. (2) The community feedback to individual investment on a user level is received as the number of community members that define a user as their friend. However, on a project level the two participation types differ: a project feedback positively correlates with social participation investment, but contrary to the hypothesis - negatively correlates with project creation investment. It seems that the project feedback is influenced by friendship rather than by project quality. (3) No gender differences are found in participation patterns or in project complexity, suggesting that Scratch opens equal possibilities to both genders in programming, learning and participation. In addition, the content contribution level found in the study is higher than usual in adult content creation communities. Possible explanations are participants' age, the nature of interactive media, or features of the Scratch site design.