Scratch as Social Network: Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis in Scratch Projects
Isabella Gra{\ss}l, Gordon Fraser

TL;DR
This study investigates whether social network analysis techniques can be applied to Scratch projects to identify socially relevant topics and sentiments, revealing insights into young programmers' interests and societal influences.
Contribution
It demonstrates the feasibility of applying social network analysis to Scratch data, highlighting the reflection of societal events and cultural trends in young programmers' projects and comments.
Findings
Topics from pop and net culture are prevalent in Scratch projects.
Recent societal events like Covid-19 and BLM are reflected in the projects.
Comments are mostly positive with youth-oriented language.
Abstract
Societal matters like the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement influence software engineering, as the recent debate on replacing certain discriminatory terms such as whitelist/blacklist has shown. Identifying relevant and trending societal matters is important, and often done using social network analysis for traditional social media channels such as twitter. In this paper we explore whether this type of analysis can also be used for introspection of the software world, by looking at the thriving scene of young Scratch programmers. The educational programming language Scratch is not only used for teaching programming concepts, but offers a platform for young programmers to express and share their creativity on any topics of relevance. By analyzing titles and project comments in a dataset of 106.032 Scratch projects, we explore which topics are common in the Scratch community, whether…
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