Scratch Community Blocks: Supporting Children as Data Scientists

TL;DR

This paper introduces Scratch Community Blocks, a system empowering children to analyze and visualize their own data from Scratch, fostering data literacy and self-reflection among young learners.

Contribution

It presents a novel system that shifts data analysis from adults to children, enabling them to engage with their participation data in meaningful ways.

Findings

Children can effectively analyze and visualize their data.

The system promotes self-reflection on learning and participation.

Children's engagement with data increases through the tool.

Abstract

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.