Scratch Community Blocks: Supporting Children as Data Scientists
This addresses the problem of data literacy and self-reflection for children in online learning communities, representing a novel method rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling children to analyze their own participation data in the Scratch programming community, resulting in a system that supports them in data representation, question-answering, and self-reflection about learning.
In this paper, we present Scratch Community Blocks, a new system that enables children to programmatically access, analyze, and visualize data about their participation in Scratch, an online community for learning computer programming. At its core, our approach involves a shift in who analyzes data: from adult data scientists to young learners themselves. We first introduce the goals and design of the system and then demonstrate it by describing example projects that illustrate its functionality. Next, we show through a series of case studies how the system engages children in not only representing data and answering questions with data but also in self-reflection about their own learning and participation.