A longitudinal dataset of five years of public activity in the Scratch online community
This provides a large, comprehensive dataset for researchers studying youth programming and online communities, though it is incremental as it focuses on data collection rather than new methods.
The authors compiled a longitudinal dataset covering five years of public activity in the Scratch online community, including data on over 1 million users, 2 million projects, 10 million comments, and 30 million project visits, along with source code for validation.
Scratch is a programming environment and an online community where young people can create, share, learn, and communicate. In collaboration with the Scratch Team at MIT, we created a longitudinal dataset of public activity in the Scratch online community during its first five years (2007-2012). The dataset comprises 32 tables with information on more than 1 million Scratch users, nearly 2 million Scratch projects, more than 10 million comments, more than 30 million visits to Scratch projects, and more. To help researchers understand this dataset, and to establish the validity of the data, we also include the source code of every version of the software that operated the website, as well as the software used to generate this dataset. We believe this is the largest and most comprehensive downloadable dataset of youth programming artifacts and communication.