From Hanging Out to Figuring It Out: Socializing Online as a Pathway to Computational Thinking

TL;DR

This study explores how online social interactions, especially participatory debugging on Scratch, foster computational thinking by analyzing user comments and identifying social factors that promote collaborative learning.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of participatory debugging, analyzes its prevalence on Scratch, and develops a theoretical framework linking social dynamics to learning in online communities.

Findings

Participatory debugging is a common collaborative troubleshooting practice.

Sustained community and identifiable problems promote participatory debugging.

Topic porousness enables conversations to span multiple topics, enhancing learning.

Abstract

Although socializing is a powerful driver of youth engagement online, platforms struggle to leverage engagement to promote learning. We seek to understand this dynamic using a multi-stage analysis of over 14,000 comments on Scratch, an online platform designed to support learning about programming. First, we inductively develop the concept of "participatory debugging" -- a practice through which users learn through collaborative technical troubleshooting. Second, we use a content analysis to establish how common the practice is on Scratch. Third, we conduct a qualitative analysis of user activity over time and identify three factors that serve as social antecedents of participatory debugging: (1) sustained community, (2) identifiable problems, and (3) what we call "topic porousness" to describe conversations that are able to span multiple topics. We integrate these findings in a theoretical framework that highlights a productive tension between the desire to promote learning and the interest-driven sub-communities that drive user engagement in many new media environments.