Designing Groups for Scratch Conceptual Exploration Sophia Yuditskaya MAS 714J Final Project Design Brief December 10 2008 Introduction Scratch has great potential for social learning and collaboration but no effective group structure to support these community based activities In its present state the Scratch community can be described as a set of individuals with little connection to each other beyond the shared interest in making Scratch projects which again are primarily individual works As one enormous single layer collection of individuals both people and projects it is becoming increasingly evident in Scratch that its current state of affairs is not scalable as a community Not only is it hard for users to nd common interests in a vast sea of individual work but also it is dif cult for Scratch users to nd an appreciative audience and meaningful feedback in response to their creative efforts A more well de ned way for Scratch members to identify with each other would greatly facilitate social learning Groups would give Scratch users a platform to organize themselves into meaningful sub communities When organized well meaningful sub communities naturally come together to form a more meaningful and scalable overall community Besides building community identities through groupings across shared interests Scratch members would be able to use this construct to create long lasting af nity groups out of collaborative efforts 1 In addition one of the underlying motivations for members to keep creating Scratch projects and be active long term participants in the Scratch community is understood to come from the personal need for self expression Scratch was thus developed to play at least two intrinsic roles in addition to being a hands on classroom for learning programming concepts in an accessible way it is also an open but safe forum of selfexpression From this perspective a formal platform for forming social groups would inspire Scratchers to think consciously about their identities this would in turn encourage more purposeful self expression The goal of this work is to develop a conceptual design of a group construct for Scratch that will remove the existing barriers to social learning and collaboration in the community by providing a formal setting and toolbox for these activities and connecting users with shared interests in a very well de ned way All features in this work have been designed with primarily an audience of children in mind A Study of the Community of Practice A Scratch group construct needs to be customized to the preferences culture and unique character of the Scratch community of practice In order for users to nd it useful and relevant any new feature must address the needs of the community and seamlessly integrate into the existing Scratch design To this end the User Suggestions section of the Scratch Forums proved to be a valuable resource for gathering information about what features and improvements Scratchers would like to have introduced into Scratch and to get familiar with the perspective of the experienced Scratch user Browsing through the forums it quickly became evident that Scratch users are looking for some sort of meaningful organization of projects and galleries as well as a greater sense of connectedness with others in the Scratch community One Scratch user named Toasty mentions how if they want to create their own sub communities and connect with other Scratchers they are left to their own devices Multiple users voice their agreement that the gallery system is out of control with too many new projects that often are unrelated to the theme of a design studio Hierarchical organization by topic is mentioned as a possible solution by Scratch user Paddle2See Another user ashbyr1 expresses how individual creative efforts seem to get lost in the sheer vastness of the corpus of projects never quite nding their way to an appreciative audience The worst feeling in the world is to pour your hard work and creativity into a project only to have it ignored completely by the Scratch community The problem is not that the Scratch community doesn t care The problem is that we are all overwhelmed with the number of new projects ashbyr1 Scratch Critique Groups Ashbyr1 goes on to propose the idea of forming themed critique groups using Scratch galleries the only Scratch resource that currently makes this possible In a critique group users would be able to submit relevantly themed projects and receive feedback advice and other commentary from an appreciative audience In effect the existence of a critique group associated with a speci c theme would act as a magnet to collect a focused audience that shares this same niche interest This idea by ashbyr1 was extremely well received and many such ad hoc critique groups have since been created across a variety of niche interests The use of galleries to form critique groups is not well suited for social learning however In the current setup critiques are submitted as comments to the project webpage and are therefore buried within the context of the individual project The process of searching for critiques thus involves wading through project after project in a critique group gallery checking to see if there is any feedback on the project webpage Tedious as this is it is even more dif cult to nd meaningful critiques Worse yet nding meaningful critiques that are relevant to a user s personal interests in the current gallery setup of critique groups seems equivalent to the task of nding a needle in a haystack Scratch users have expressed opinions that more generally con rm these problems that are observed with galleries Galleries are nice but it would be easier to nd the projects you want if people from the scratch team gathered some of the model projects and sorted them into groups Then you would have a good library of simulations artworks tutorials ect sic without going through the hassle of looking though a bunch of galleries archmage Scratch Companies One measure of the success of an idea within a community is when it becomes the equivalent of a household word in that community In other words the relevance of that idea is widely accepted by the community to such an extent that there is a collective agreement on a particular name to describe it When a concept earns this status within the community it becomes a de ning element of the culture of that community Critique groups are one example of this phenomenon Another such