Affiliation:
1. Utah State University, Logan, UT
2. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
3. Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles, CA
Abstract
Most research in primary and secondary computing education has focused on understanding learners within formal classroom communities, leaving aside the growing number of promising informal online programming communities where young users contribute, comment, and collaborate on programs to facilitate learning. In this article, we examined trends in computational participation in Scratch, an online community with over 1 million registered youth designers. Drawing on a random sample of 5,004 youth programmers and their activities over 3 months in early 2012, we examined programming concepts used in projects in relation to level of participation, gender, and length of membership of Scratch programmers. Latent class analysis results identified the same four groups of programmers in each month based on the usage of different programming concepts and showed how membership in these groups shifted in different ways across time. Strikingly, the largest group of project creators (named Loops) used the simplest and fewest programming concepts. Further, this group was the most stable in membership and was disproportionately female. In contrast, the more complex programming groups (named Variables, Low Booleans, and High Booleans) showed much movement across time. Further, the Low Booleans and High Booleans groups, the only groups to use “and,” “or,” and “not” statements in their programs, were disproportionately male. In the discussion, we address the challenges of analyzing young learners’ programming in informal online communities and opportunities for designing more equitable computational participation.
Funder
National Science Foundation
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Subject
Education,General Computer Science
Reference48 articles.
1. A tale of two online communities
2. Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics: Applications to Constructionist Research
3. Using Learning Analytics to Understand the Learning Pathways of Novice Programmers
4. Programming Pluralism: Using Learning Analytics to Detect Patterns in the Learning of Computer Programming
5. K. Brennan. 2013. Best of Both Worlds: Issues of Structure and Agency in Computational Creation in and out of School. Unpublished Dissertation. Cambridge MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. K. Brennan. 2013. Best of Both Worlds: Issues of Structure and Agency in Computational Creation in and out of School. Unpublished Dissertation. Cambridge MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Cited by
38 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献