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

2. Scratch: Online Community of Interactive Projects Browse View projects Download

3. 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

5. Background 1 Scratch - constructionist, social environment (Papert, 1980; Resnick, 2007 )‏ Participation patterns (Jenkins, 2006; Monroy-Hernández & Resnick, 2008)‏

6. Background 2 Motivation for contribution (Rafaeli & Ariel, 2008; Rafaeli, Raban & Ravid, 2007)‏ Uses and gratification (Rubin, 1994)‏

7. 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

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

9. 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

10. Projects created by Israeli Scratch community (July 2008) 80% / 17% / 3% 100 / >1000

11. 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)‏

12. 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

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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

16. Motivation for participation? Design for participation?