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  <p>Even after controlling for a number of factors like social engageme ...
  

Source: http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings/feed

1. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
2. <feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><title>Sayamindu Dasgupta</title><link href="https://unmad.in/" rel="alternate"></link><link href="https://unmad.in/blog/feed" rel="self"></link><id>https://unmad.in/</id><updated>2019-05-13T00:00:00-04:00</updated><entry><title>The Shifting Dynamics of Boys and Girls’ Decision to Share their Creative Programming Projects</title><link href="https://unmad.in/blog/2019/05/the-shifting-dynamics-of-boys-and-girls-decision-to-share-their-creative-programming-projects/" rel="alternate"></link><published>2019-05-13T00:00:00-04:00</published><updated>2019-05-13T00:00:00-04:00</updated><author><name>Emilia Gan</name></author><id>tag:unmad.in,2019-05-13:/blog/2019/05/the-shifting-dynamics-of-boys-and-girls-decision-to-share-their-creative-programming-projects/</id><summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;Informal online learning communities are one of the most exciting and successful ways to engage young people in technology. As the most successful example of the approach, over &lt;a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/"&gt;40 million children&lt;/a&gt; from around the world have created accounts on the &lt;a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/"&gt;Scratch online community&lt;/a&gt; where they learn to code by creating …&lt;/p&gt;</summary><content type="html">&lt;p&gt;Informal online learning communities are one of the most exciting and successful ways to engage young people in technology. As the most successful example of the approach, over &lt;a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/"&gt;40 million children&lt;/a&gt; from around the world have created accounts on the &lt;a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/"&gt;Scratch online community&lt;/a&gt; where they learn to code by creating interactive art, games, and stories. However, despite its enormous reach and its focus on inclusiveness, participation in Scratch is not as broad as one would hope. For example, reflecting a trend in the broader computing community, more boys have signed up on the Scratch website than&amp;nbsp;girls.&lt;/p&gt;
3. <p>In a recently published paper, I worked with several colleagues from the <a href="https://communitydata.science">Community Data Science Collective</a> to unpack the dynamics of unequal participation by gender in Scratch by looking at whether Scratch users choose to share the projects they create. Our analysis took advantage of the fact that less than a third of projects created in Scratch are ever shared publicly. By never sharing, creators never open themselves to the benefits associated with interaction, feedback, socialization, and learning—all things that research has shown participation in Scratch can support.</p>
4. <p>Overall, we found that boys on Scratch share their projects at a slightly higher rate than girls. Digging deeper, we found that this overall average hid an important dynamic that emerged over time. The graph below shows the proportion of Scratch projects shared for male and female Scratch users’ 1st created projects, 2nd created projects, 3rd created projects, and so on. It reflects the fact that although girls share less often initially, this trend flips over time. Experienced girls share much more than often than boys!</p>
5. <figure style="width:80%;" >
6.    <img src="/images/blog/2019/scratch-gender-feedback/gan_etal-figure_3-whitebg.png" alt="Proportion of projects shared by gender across experience levels.">
7.    <figcaption>Proportion of projects shared by gender across experience levels, measured as the number of projects created, for 1.1 million Scratch users. Projects created by girls are less likely to be shared than those by boys until about the 9th project is created. The relationship is subsequently reversed.</figcaption>
8. </figure>
9.  
10. <p>We unpacked this dynamic using a series of statistical models estimated using data from over 5 million projects by over a million Scratch users. This set of analyses echoed our earlier preliminary finding—while girls were less likely to share initially, more experienced girls shared projects at consistently higher rates than boys. We further found that initial differences in sharing between boys and girls could be explained by controlling for differences in project complexity and in the social connectedness of the project creator.</p>
11. <p>Another surprising finding is that users who had received more positive peer feedback, at least as measured by receipt of “love its” (similar to “likes” on Facebook), were less likely to share their subsequent projects than users who had received less. This relation was especially strong for boys and for more experienced Scratch users. We speculate that this could be due to a phenomenon known in the music industry as “sophomore album syndrome” or “second album syndrome”—a term used to describe a musician who has had a successful first album but struggles to produce a second because of increased pressure and expectations caused by their previous success</p>
12. <hr>
13. &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This blog post (first published on the &lt;a href="https://blog.communitydata.science/scratch-gender-feedback-dynamics/"&gt;Community Data Science Collective blog&lt;/a&gt;) and the paper are collaborative work with &lt;a href="https://twitter.com/gan_ef"&gt;Emilia Gan&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="https://mako.cc/"&gt;Benjamin Mako Hill&lt;/a&gt;. You can find more details about our methodology and results in the text of our paper, “&lt;a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3274323"&gt;Gender, Feedback, and Learners’ Decisions to Share Their Creative Computing Projects&lt;/a&gt;” which is freely available and published open access in the Proceedings of the &lt;span class="caps"&gt;ACM&lt;/span&gt; on Human-Computer Interaction 2 (&lt;span class="caps"&gt;CSCW&lt;/span&gt;):&amp;nbsp;54:1-54:23.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content><category term="blog"></category><category term="research"></category><category term="design"></category><category term="learning"></category><category term="wide walls"></category><category term="natural experiment"></category><category term="scratch"></category></entry><entry><title>Testing the “wide walls” design principle in the wild</title><link href="https://unmad.in/blog/2018/05/testing-the-wide-walls-design-principle-in-the-wild/" rel="alternate"></link><published>2018-05-23T00:00:00-04:00</published><updated>2018-05-23T00:00:00-04:00</updated><author><name>Sayamindu Dasgupta</name></author><id>tag:unmad.in,2018-05-23:/blog/2018/05/testing-the-wide-walls-design-principle-in-the-wild/</id><summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;Seymour Papert is credited as saying that tools to support learning should have “high ceilings” and “low floors.” The phrase is meant to suggest that tools should allow learners to do complex and intellectually sophisticated things but should also be easy to begin using quickly. Mitchel Resnick extended the metaphor …&lt;/p&gt;</summary><content type="html">&lt;p&gt;Seymour Papert is credited as saying that tools to support learning should have “high ceilings” and “low floors.” The phrase is meant to suggest that tools should allow learners to do complex and intellectually sophisticated things but should also be easy to begin using quickly. Mitchel Resnick extended the metaphor to argue that learning toolkits should also have &lt;a href="https://design.blog/2016/08/25/mitchel-resnick-designing-for-wide-walls/"&gt;“wide walls”&lt;/a&gt; in that they should appeal to diverse groups of learners and allow for a broad variety of creative outcomes. In &lt;a href="https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3173935"&gt;a new paper&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://mako.cc/academic/"&gt;Benjamin Mako Hill&lt;/a&gt; and I attempted to provide the first empirical test of Resnick&amp;rsquo;s wide walls theory. Using a natural experiment in the Scratch online community, we found causal evidence that “widening walls” can, as Resnick suggested, increase both engagement and&amp;nbsp;learning.&lt;/p&gt;
14. <p>Over the last ten years, the “wide walls” design principle has been widely cited in the design of new systems. For example, Resnick and his collaborators relied heavily on the principle in the design of the <a href="https://scratch.mit.edu">Scratch</a> programming language. Scratch allows young learners to produce not only games, but also interactive art, music videos, greetings card, stories, and much more. As part of that team, I was guided by “wide walls” principle when I designed and implemented the <a href="https://en.scratch-wiki.info/wiki/Cloud_Data">Scratch cloud variables system</a> in 2011-2012.</p>
15. <p>While designing the system, I hoped to “widen walls” by supporting a broader range of ways to use variables and data structures in Scratch. Scratch cloud variables extend the affordances of the normal Scratch variable by adding <em>persistence</em> and <em>shared-ness</em>. A simple example of something possible with cloud variables, but not without them, is a global high-score leaderboard in a game (example code is below). After the system was launched, I saw many young Scratch users using the system to engage with data structures in new and incredibly creative ways.</p>
16. <figure style="width:40%;" >
17.    <img src="/images/blog/2018/testing-wide-walls/cloud-variable-script.png" alt="cloud variable script">
18.    <figcaption>Example of Scratch code that uses a cloud variable to keep track of high-scores among all players of a game.</figcaption>
19. </figure>
20.  
21. <p>Although these examples reflected powerful anecdotal evidence, I was also interested in using quantitative data to reflect the causal effect of the system. Understanding the causal effect of a new design in real world settings is a major challenge. To do so, we took advantage of a “natural experiment” and some clever techniques from econometrics to measure how learners’ behavior changed when they were given access to a wider design space.</p>
22. <p>Understanding the design of our study requires understanding a little bit about how access to the Scratch cloud variable system is granted. Although the system has been accessible to Scratch users since 2013, new Scratch users do not get access immediately. They are granted access only after a certain amount of time and activity on the website (the specific criteria are not public). Our “experiment” involved a sudden change in policy that altered the criteria for who gets access to the cloud variable feature. Through no act of their own, more than 14,000 users were given access to feature, literally overnight. We looked at these Scratch users immediately before and after the policy change to estimate the effect of access to the broader design space that cloud variables afforded.</p>
23. <p>We found that use of data-related features was, as predicted, increased by both access to and use of cloud variables. We also found that this increase was not only an effect of projects that use cloud variables themselves. In other words, learners with access to cloud variables—and especially those who had used it—were more likely to use “plain-old” data-structures in their projects as well.</p>
24. <p>The graph below visualizes the results of one of the statistical models in our paper and suggests that we would expect that 33% of projects by a prototypical “average” Scratch user would use data structures if the user in question had never used used cloud variables but that we would expect that 60% of projects by a similar user would if they <em>had</em> used the system.</p>
25. <figure style="width:70%;" >
26.    <img src="/images/blog/2018/testing-wide-walls/graph.png" alt="probability graph">
27.    <figcaption>Model-predicted probability that a project made by a prototypical Scratch user will contain data structures (w/o counting projects with cloud variables)</figcaption>
28. </figure>
29.  
30. <p>It is important to note that the estimated effective above is a “local average effect” among people who used the system because they were granted access by the sudden change in policy (this is a subtle but important point that we explain this in some depth in the paper). Although we urge care and skepticism in interpreting our numbers, we believe our results are encouraging evidence in support of the “wide walls” design principle.</p>
31. <p>Of course, our work is not without important limitations. Critically, we also found that rate of adoption of cloud variables was very low. Although it is hard to pinpoint the exact reason for this from the data we observed, it has been suggested that widening walls may have a potential negative side-effect of making it harder for learners to imagine what the new creative possibilities might be in the absence of targeted support and scaffolding. Also important to remember is that our study measures “wide walls” in a specific way in a specific context and that it is hard to know how well our findings will generalize to other contexts and communities. We discuss these caveats, as well as our methods, models, and theoretical background in detail in our paper which now available for <a href="https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3173935">download as an open-access piece</a> from the <span class="caps">ACM</span> digital library.</p>
32. <hr>
33. <p><em>This blog post, and <a href="https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3173935">the open access paper</a> that it describes, is a collaborative project with <a href="https://mako.cc/academic/">Benjamin Mako Hill</a>. Financial support came from the eScience Institute and the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. Quantitative analyses for this project were completed using the Hyak high performance computing cluster at the University of Washington.</em></p>
34. <!--  LocalWords:  Scratchers Scratcher img src figcaption br nbsp
35. -->
36.  
37. <!--  LocalWords:  eScience Hyak
38. --&gt;</content><category term="blog"></category><category term="research"></category><category term="design"></category><category term="learning"></category><category term="wide walls"></category><category term="natural experiment"></category><category term="scratch"></category></entry><entry><title>Big news</title><link href="https://unmad.in/blog/2017/07/big-news/" rel="alternate"></link><published>2017-07-02T00:00:00-04:00</published><updated>2017-07-02T00:00:00-04:00</updated><author><name>Sayamindu Dasgupta</name></author><id>tag:unmad.in,2017-07-02:/blog/2017/07/big-news/</id><summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;Last month, after nearly 5 years of knowing each other, sharing each other&amp;rsquo;s interests, and learning from each other, &lt;a href="http://www.sucheta.net/"&gt;Sucheta&lt;/a&gt; and I got&amp;nbsp;married.&lt;/p&gt;
39. &lt;p&gt;We had a small ceremony with close friends by the &lt;a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea"&gt;Salish Sea&lt;/a&gt; on the beautiful &lt;a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orcas_Island"&gt;Orcas Island&lt;/a&gt;. We will have a more “formal” get together …&lt;/p&gt;</summary><content type="html">&lt;p&gt;Last month, after nearly 5 years of knowing each other, sharing each other&amp;rsquo;s interests, and learning from each other, &lt;a href="http://www.sucheta.net/"&gt;Sucheta&lt;/a&gt; and I got&amp;nbsp;married.&lt;/p&gt;
40. <p>We had a small ceremony with close friends by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea">Salish Sea</a> on the beautiful <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orcas_Island">Orcas Island</a>. We will have a more “formal” get together in Kolkata later this year on dates <span class="caps">TBD</span>.</p>
41. <p>Here is a picture of us:</p>
42. <p><img alt="Picture of us" src="/images/blog/2017/big-news/us.jpg" title="Our picture"></p>
43. <p>…and here are some pictures from the ceremony taken by <a href="http://www.stevehorn.net/">Steve Horn</a>:</p>
44. <p><img alt="Picture of the ceremony 1" src="/images/blog/2017/big-news/ceremony2.jpg" title="Our ceremony"></p>
45. <p><img alt="Picture of the ceremony 2 " src="/images/blog/2017/big-news/ceremony3.jpg" title="Our ceremony"></p>
46. &lt;p&gt;&lt;img alt="Picture of the ceremony 3" src="/images/blog/2017/big-news/ceremony4.jpg" title="Our ceremony"&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content><category term="blog"></category><category term="personal"></category><category term="life"></category></entry><entry><title>Learning to code in one’s own language</title><link href="https://unmad.in/blog/2017/06/learning-to-code-in-ones-own-language/" rel="alternate"></link><published>2017-06-26T00:00:00-04:00</published><updated>2017-06-26T00:00:00-04:00</updated><author><name>Sayamindu Dasgupta</name></author><id>tag:unmad.in,2017-06-26:/blog/2017/06/learning-to-code-in-ones-own-language/</id><summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;Millions of young people from around the world are learning to code. Often, during their learning experiences, these youth are using visual block-based programming languages like &lt;a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/"&gt;Scratch&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/"&gt;App Inventor&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href="https://studio.code.org/courses"&gt;Code.org Studio&lt;/a&gt;. In block-based programming languages, coders manipulate visual, snap-together blocks that represent code constructs instead of textual symbols …&lt;/p&gt;</summary><content type="html">&lt;p&gt;Millions of young people from around the world are learning to code. Often, during their learning experiences, these youth are using visual block-based programming languages like &lt;a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/"&gt;Scratch&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/"&gt;App Inventor&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href="https://studio.code.org/courses"&gt;Code.org Studio&lt;/a&gt;. In block-based programming languages, coders manipulate visual, snap-together blocks that represent code constructs instead of textual symbols and commands that are found in more traditional programming&amp;nbsp;languages.&lt;/p&gt;
47. <p>The textual symbols used in nearly all non-block-based programming languages are drawn from English—consider “if” statements and “for” loops for common examples. Keywords in block-based languages, on the other hand, are often translated into different human languages. For example, depending on the language preference of the user, an identical set of computing instructions in Scratch can be represented in many different human languages:</p>
48. <p><img alt="Scratch code translated into English, Italian, Norwegian Bokmål, and German" src="/images/blog/2017/learning-local-languages/scratch-blocks-translated.png" title="Scratch code translated into English, Italian, Norwegian Bokmål, and German."></p>
49. <p>Although my research with <a href="https://mako.cc/academic/">Benjamin Mako Hill</a> focuses on learning, both Mako and I worked on local language technologies before coming back to academia. As a result, we were both interested in how the increasing translation of programming languages might be making it easier for non-English speaking kids to learn to code.</p>
50. <p>After all, a large body of <a href="http://theirworld.org/news/why-teaching-in-mother-tongue-could-help-500m-children">education research</a> has shown that early-stage education is more effective when instruction is in the language that the learner speaks at home. Based on this research, we hypothesized that <em>children learning to code with block-based programming languages translated to their mother-tongues will have better learning outcomes than children using the blocks in English</em>.</p>
51. <p>We sought to test this hypothesis in <a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a>, an informal learning community built around a block-based programming language. We were helped by the fact that Scratch is translated into many languages and has a <a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/#countries">large number</a> of learners from around the world.</p>
52. <p>To measure learning, we built on some of our <a href="https://medium.com/mit-media-lab/studying-the-relationship-between-remixing-learning-c1df54c302df">our own previous work</a> and looked at learners’ <em>cumulative block repertoires</em>—similar to a code vocabulary. By observing a learner’s <em>cumulative block repertoire</em> over time, we can measure how quickly their code vocabulary is growing.</p>
53. <p>Using this data, we compared the rate of growth of <em>cumulative block repertoire</em> between learners from non-English speaking countries using Scratch in English to learners from the same countries using Scratch in their local language. To identify non-English speakers, we considered Scratch users who reported themselves as coming from five primarily non-English speaking countries: Portugal, Italy, Brazil, Germany, and Norway. We chose these five countries because they each have one very widely spoken language that is not English and because Scratch is almost fully translated into that language.</p>
54. <p>Even after controlling for a number of factors like social engagement on the Scratch website, user productivity, and time spent on projects, we found that learners from these countries who use Scratch in their local language have a higher rate of <em>cumulative block repertoire</em> growth than their counterparts using Scratch in English. This faster growth was despite having a lower initial block repertoire. The graph below visualizes our results for two “prototypical” learners who start with the same initial block repertoire: <span style="color:#f98a82;">one learner who uses the English interface</span>, and <span style=color:#05c0c5;"">a second learner who uses their native language</span>.</p>
55. <p><img alt="Graph of our results" src="/images/blog/2017/learning-local-languages/localization-results.png" title="Comparison of two “prototypical” learners—one using Scratch in English, while the other using it in their local language."></p>
56. <p>Our results are in line with what theories of education have to say about learning in one’s own language. Our findings also represent good news for designers of block-based programming languages who have spent considerable amounts of effort in making their programming languages translatable. It’s also good news for the volunteers who have spent many hours translating blocks and user interfaces.</p>
57. <p>Although we find support for our hypothesis, we should stress that our findings are both limited and incomplete. For example, because we focus on estimating the differences between Scratch learners, our comparisons are between kids who all managed to successfully use Scratch. Before Scratch was translated, kids with little working knowledge of English or the Latin script might not have been able to use Scratch at all. Because of translation, many of these children are now able to learn to code.</p>
58. <p><span style="font-size:75%; color:gray;">
59. This blog-post and the work that it describes is a collaborative project with <a href="https://mako.cc/academic/">Benjamin Mako Hill</a>.  You can read our paper <a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3051464">here</a>. The paper was published in the <a href="learningatscale.acm.org/las2017/"><span class="caps">ACM</span> Learning @ Scale Conference</a>. We also recently gave a talk about this work at the <a href="http://www.icahdq.org/page/Conference">International Communication Association’s annual conference</a>. We have received support and feedback from members of the Scratch team at <span class="caps">MIT</span> (especially Mitch Resnick and Natalie Rusk), as well as from Nathan TeBlunthuis at the University of Washington. Financial support came from the <span class="caps">US</span> National Science Foundation.
60. &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content><category term="blog"></category><category term="research"></category><category term="data science"></category><category term="learning"></category><category term="localization"></category></entry><entry><title>Children’s Perspectives on Critical Data Literacies</title><link href="https://unmad.in/blog/2017/05/critical-data-literacies/" rel="alternate"></link><published>2017-05-18T16:55:00-04:00</published><updated>2017-05-18T16:55:00-04:00</updated><author><name>Samantha Hautea</name></author><id>tag:unmad.in,2017-05-18:/blog/2017/05/critical-data-literacies/</id><summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;Last week, we presented a &lt;a class="reference external" href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3025823"&gt;new paper&lt;/a&gt; that describes how children are thinking through some of the implications of new forms of data collection and analysis. The presentation was given at the &lt;a class="reference external" href="https://chi2017.acm.org/"&gt;&lt;span class="caps"&gt;ACM&lt;/span&gt; &lt;span class="caps"&gt;CHI&lt;/span&gt; conference&lt;/a&gt; in Denver last week and the paper &lt;a class="reference external" href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3025823"&gt;is open access and online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
61. &lt;p&gt;Over the last …&lt;/p&gt;</summary><content type="html">&lt;p&gt;Last week, we presented a &lt;a class="reference external" href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3025823"&gt;new paper&lt;/a&gt; that describes how children are thinking through some of the implications of new forms of data collection and analysis. The presentation was given at the &lt;a class="reference external" href="https://chi2017.acm.org/"&gt;&lt;span class="caps"&gt;ACM&lt;/span&gt; &lt;span class="caps"&gt;CHI&lt;/span&gt; conference&lt;/a&gt; in Denver last week and the paper &lt;a class="reference external" href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3025823"&gt;is open access and online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
62. <p>Over the last couple years, we’ve worked on a large project to support children in <em>doing</em> — and not just learning about — data science. We built a system, <a class="reference external" href="https://medium.com/hci-design-at-uw/supporting-children-in-doing-data-science-48414a8cf085">Scratch Community Blocks</a>, that allows the 18 million users of the <a class="reference external" href="https://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch online community</a> to write their own computer programs — in Scratch of course — to analyze data about their own learning and social interactions. An example of one of those programs to find how many of one’s follower in Scratch are not from the United States is shown below.</p>
63. <img alt="" src="/images/blog/2017/critical-data-literacies/data_literacies_eg.png" />
64. <br> <br><p>Last year, we deployed Scratch Community Blocks to 2,500 active Scratch users who, over a period of several months, used the system to create more than 1,600 projects.</p>
65. <p>As children used the system, Samantha Hautea, a student in <span class="caps">UW</span>’s <a class="reference external" href="https://commlead.uw.edu/">Communication Leadership</a> program, led a group of us in an <a class="reference external" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_ethnography">online ethnography</a>. We visited the projects children were creating and sharing. We followed the forums where users discussed the blocks. We read comment threads left on projects. We combined Samantha’s detailed field notes with the text of comments and forum posts, with ethnographic interviews of several users, and with notes from two in-person workshops. We used a technique called <a class="reference external" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory">grounded theory</a> to analyze these data.</p>
66. <p>What we found surprised us. We expected children to reflect on being challenged by — and hopefully overcoming — the technical parts of doing data science. Although we certainly saw this happen, what emerged much more strongly from our analysis was detailed discussion among children about the <em>social implications of data collection and analysis</em>.</p>
67. <p>In our analysis, we grouped children’s comments into five major themes that represented what we called “critical data literacies.” These literacies reflect things that children felt were important implications of social media data collection and analysis.</p>
68. <p>First, children reflected on the way that programmatic access to data — even data that was technically public — introduced privacy concerns. One user described the ability to analyze data as, “creepy”, but at the same time, “very cool.” Children expressed concern that programmatic access to data could lead to “stalking“ and suggested that the system should ask for permission.</p>
69. <p>Second, children recognized that data analysis requires skepticism and interpretation. For example, Scratch Community Blocks introduced a bug where the block that returned data about followers included users with disabled accounts. One user, in an interview described to us how he managed to figure out the inconsistency:</p>
70. <blockquote>
71. At one point the follower blocks, it said I have slightly more followers than I do. And, that was kind of confusing when I was trying to make the project. […] I pulled up a second [browser] tab and compared the [data from Scratch Community Blocks and the data in my profile].</blockquote>
72. <p>Third, children discussed the hidden assumptions and decisions that drive the construction of metrics. For example, the number of views received for each project in Scratch is counted using an algorithm that tries to minimize the impact of gaming the system (similar to, for example, <a class="reference external" href="https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2991785">Youtube</a>). As children started to build programs with data, they started to uncover and speculate about the decisions behind metrics. For example, they guessed that the view count might only include “unique” views and that view counts may include users who do not have accounts on the website.</p>
73. <p>Fourth, children building projects with Scratch Community Blocks realized that an algorithm driven by social data may cause certain users to be excluded. For example, a 13-year-old expressed concern that the system could be used to exclude users with few social connections saying:</p>
74. <blockquote>
75. <div class="line-block">
76. <div class="line">I love these new Scratch Blocks! However I did notice that they could be used to exclude new Scratchers or Scratchers with not a lot of followers by using a code: like this:</div>
77. <div class="line"><br /></div>
78. <div class="line-block">
79. <div class="line">when flag clicked</div>
80. <div class="line-block">
81. <div class="line">if then user’s followers < 300</div>
82. <div class="line-block">
83. <div class="line">stop all.</div>
84. <div class="line"><br /></div>
85. </div>
86. </div>
87. </div>
88. <div class="line">I do not think this a big problem as it would be easy to remove this code but I did just want to bring this to your attention in case this not what you would want the blocks to be used for.</div>
89. </div>
90. </blockquote>
91. <p>Fifth, children were concerned about the possibility that measurement might distort the Scratch community’s values. While giving feedback on the new system, a user expressed concern that by making it easier to measure and compare followers, the system could elevate popularity over creativity, collaboration, and respect as a marker of success in Scratch.</p>
92. <blockquote>
93. I think this was a great idea! I am just a bit worried that people will make these projects and take it the wrong way, saying that followers are the most important thing in on Scratch.</blockquote>
94. <p>Kids’ conversations around Scratch Community Blocks are good news for educators who are starting to think about how to engage young learners in thinking critically about the implications of data. Although no kid using Scratch Community Blocks discussed each of the five literacies described above, the themes reflect starting points for educators designing ways to engage kids in thinking critically about data.</p>
95. <p>Our work shows that if children are given opportunities to actively engage and build with social and behavioral data, they might not only learn how to do data analysis, but also reflect on its implications.</p>
96. <div style="font-size:85%; font-style:italic;">
97. This blog-post and the work that it describes is a collaborative project by <a href="https://twitter.com/mannerminded">Samantha Hautea, <a href="https://unmad.in/">Sayamindu Dasgupta, and <a href="https://mako.cc/">Benjamin Mako Hill</a>. We have also received support and feedback from members of the Scratch team at <span class="caps">MIT</span> (especially Mitch Resnick and Natalie Rusk), as well as from Hal Abelson from <span class="caps">MIT</span> <span class="caps">CSAIL</span>. Financial support came from the <span class="caps">US</span> National Science Foundation.
98. </div><!-- Localwords:  Hautea literacies -->
99. </content><category term="research"></category><category term="scratch community blocks"></category><category term="learning"></category><category term="kids"></category><category term="critical data literacies"></category><category term="data science education"></category></entry><entry><title>Supporting children in doing data science</title><link href="https://unmad.in/blog/2017/01/supporting-children-in-doing-data-science/" rel="alternate"></link><published>2017-01-30T00:00:00-05:00</published><updated>2017-01-30T00:00:00-05:00</updated><author><name>Sayamindu Dasgupta</name></author><id>tag:unmad.in,2017-01-30:/blog/2017/01/supporting-children-in-doing-data-science/</id><summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;As children use digital media to learn and socialize, others are collecting and analyzing data about these activities. In school and at play, these children find that they are the &lt;em&gt;subjects&lt;/em&gt; of data science. As believers in the power of data analysis, we believe that this approach falls short of …&lt;/p&gt;</summary><content type="html">&lt;p&gt;As children use digital media to learn and socialize, others are collecting and analyzing data about these activities. In school and at play, these children find that they are the &lt;em&gt;subjects&lt;/em&gt; of data science. As believers in the power of data analysis, we believe that this approach falls short of data science&amp;rsquo;s potential to promote innovation, learning, and&amp;nbsp;power.&lt;/p&gt;
100. <p>Motivated by this fact, we have been working over the last three years as part of a team at the <span class="caps">MIT</span> Media Lab and the University of Washington to design and build a system that attempts to support an alternative vision: <em>children as data scientists.</em> The system we have built is described in a new paper—<a href="/pdfs/dasgupta-hill-scratch-community-blocks-chi2017.pdf">Scratch Community Blocks: Supporting Children as Data Scientists</a>—that will be published in the proceedings of <a href="https://chi2017.acm.org/"><span class="caps">CHI</span> 2017</a>.</p>
101. <p>Our system is built on top of Scratch, a visual, block-based programming language designed for children and youth. Scratch is also <a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/">an online community</a> with over 15 million registered members who share their Scratch projects, remix each others’ work, have conversations, provide feedback, bookmark or “love” projects they like, follow other users, and more. Over the last decade, researchers—including us—have used the Scratch online community’s database to study the youth using Scratch. With <em>Scratch Community Blocks</em>, we attempt to put the power to programmatically analyze these data into the hands of the users themselves.</p>
102. <p>To do so, our new system adds a set of new programming primitives (blocks) to Scratch so that users can access public data from the Scratch website from inside Scratch. Blocks in the new system gives users access to project and user metadata, information about social interaction, and data about what types of code are used in projects. The full palette of blocks to access different categories of data is shown below.</p>
103. <table class="table">
104.    <tbody>
105.        <tr>
106.            <td><img src="/images/blog/2017/scratch-community-blocks/data-blocks-palette-1.png"></td>
107.            <td><img src="/images/blog/2017/scratch-community-blocks/data-blocks-palette-2.png"></td>
108.            <td><img src="/images/blog/2017/scratch-community-blocks/data-blocks-palette-3.png"></td>
109.        </tr>
110.        <tr style="font-size:90%;text-align:center">
111.            <td>Project metadata</td>
112.            <td>User metadata</td>
113.            <td>Site-wide statistics</td>
114.        </tr>
115.    </tbody>
116. </table>
117.  
118. <p>The new blocks allow users to programmatically access, filter, and analyze data about their own participation in the community.
119. For example, with the simple script below, we can find whether we have followers in Scratch who report themselves to be from Spain, and what their usernames are.</p>
120. <div align="center" class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9">
121. <video autoplay loop class="embed-responsive-item">
122. <source src="/images/blog/2017/scratch-community-blocks/scratch-community-blocks.webm" type="video/webm">
123. <source src="/images/blog/2017/scratch-community-blocks/scratch-community-blocks.mp4" type="video/mp4">
124. </video>
125. </div>
126.  
127. <p>In designing the system, we had two primary motivations. First, we wanted to support avenues through which children can engage in curiosity-driven, creative explorations of public Scratch data. Second, we wanted to foster self-reflection with data. As children looked back upon their own participation and coding activity in Scratch through the project they and their peers made, we wanted them to reflect on their own behavior and learning in ways that shaped their future behavior and promoted exploration.</p>
128. <p>After designing and building the system over 2014 and 2015, we invited a group of active Scratch users to beta test the system in early 2016. Over four months, 700 users created more than 1,600 projects. The diversity and depth of users creativity with the new blocks surprised us. Children created projects that gave the viewer of the project a personalized doughnut-chart visualization of their coding vocabulary on Scratch, rendered the viewer’s number of followers as scoops of ice-cream on a cone, attempted to find whether “love-its” for projects are more common on Scratch than “favorites”, and told users how “talkative” they were by counting the cumulative string-length of project titles and descriptions.</p>
129. <p>We found that children, rather than making canonical visualizations such as pie-charts or bar-graphs, frequently made information representations that spoke to their own identities and aesthetic sensibilities. A 13-year-old girl had made a virtual doll dress-up game where the player’s ability to buy virtual clothes and accessories for the doll was determined by the level of their activity in the Scratch community. When we asked about her motivation for making such a project, she said:</p>
130. <blockquote>
131. <p>I was trying to think of something that somebody hadn’t done yet, and I didn’t see that. And also I really like to do art on Scratch and that was a good opportunity to use that and mix the two <em>[art and data]</em> together.</p>
132. </blockquote>
133. <p>We also found at least some evidence that the system supported self-reflection with data. For example, after seeing a project that showed its viewers a visualization of their past coding vocabulary, a 15-year-old realized that he does not do much programming with the pen-related primitives in Scratch, and wrote in a comment, “epic! looks like we need to use more pen blocks. :D.”</p>
134. <table class="table">
135.    <tbody>
136.        <tr>
137.            <td><img src="/images/blog/2017/scratch-community-blocks/example-doughnut-chart.png"></td>
138.            <td><img src="/images/blog/2017/scratch-community-blocks/example-icecream-viz.png"></td>
139.            <td><img src="/images/blog/2017/scratch-community-blocks/example-dressup.png"></td>
140.        </tr>
141.        <tr style="font-size:90%;text-align:center">
142.            <td>Doughnut visualization</td>
143.            <td>Ice-cream visualization</td>
144.            <td>Data-driven doll dress up</td>
145.        </tr>
146.    </tbody>
147. </table>
148.  
149. <p>Additionally, we noted that that as children made and interacted with projects made with <em>Scratch Community Blocks</em>, they started to critically think about the implications of data collection and analysis. These conversations are the subject of another <a href="https://unmad.in/pdfs/hautea-et-al-critical-data-literacies-chi2017.pdf">paper</a> (also being published in <span class="caps">CHI</span> 2017).</p>
150. <p>In a 1971 article called “<a href="https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5837">Teaching Children to be Mathematicians vs. Teaching About Mathematics</a>”, Seymour Papert argued for the need for children <em>doing</em> mathematics vs. learning about it. He showed how Logo, the programming language he was developing at that time with his colleagues, could offer children a space to use and engage with mathematical ideas in creative and personally motivated ways. This, he argued, enabled children to go beyond knowing about mathematics to “doing” mathematics, as a mathematician would.</p>
151. <p><em>Scratch Community Blocks</em> has not yet been launched for all Scratch users and has several important limitations we discuss in the paper. That said, we feel that the projects created by children in our the beta test demonstrate the real potential for children to <em>do</em> data science, and not just know about it, provide data for it, and to have their behavior nudged and shaped by it.</p>
152. <div style="font-size:85%; font-style:italic;">
153. This blog-post and the work that it describes is a collaborative project with Benjamin Mako Hill. We have also received support and feedback from members of the Scratch team at <span class="caps">MIT</span> (especially Mitch Resnick and Natalie Rusk), as well as from Hal Abelson from <span class="caps">MIT</span> <span class="caps">CSAIL</span>. Financial support came from the <span class="caps">US</span> National Science Foundation. We will be presenting this paper at <span class="caps">CHI</span> in May, and will be thrilled to talk more about our work and about future directions.
154. &lt;/div&gt;</content><category term="blog"></category><category term="research"></category><category term="scratch community blocks"></category><category term="data science"></category><category term="learning"></category></entry><entry><title>Studying the relationship between remixing &amp; learning</title><link href="https://unmad.in/blog/2016/04/remixing-learning/" rel="alternate"></link><published>2016-04-02T02:30:00-04:00</published><updated>2016-04-04T01:03:00-04:00</updated><author><name>Sayamindu Dasgupta</name></author><id>tag:unmad.in,2016-04-02:/blog/2016/04/remixing-learning/</id><summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;Examining the relationship between remixing and learning in&amp;nbsp;Scratch&lt;/p&gt;</summary><content type="html">&lt;div align="center" class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"&gt;
155. <video autoplay loop class="embed-responsive-item">
156. <source src="/images/blog/2016/remixing-learning/remix.webm" type="video/webm">
157. <source src="/images/blog/2016/remixing-learning/remix.mp4" type="video/mp4">
158. </video>
159. </div>
160.  
161. <p>With more than 10 million users, the <a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/about/">Scratch online community</a> is the largest online community where kids learn to program. Since it was created, a central goal of the community has been to promote “remixing” — the reworking and recombination of existing creative artifacts. As the video above shows, remixing programming projects in the current web-based version of Scratch is as easy is as clicking on the “see inside” button in a project web-page, and then clicking on the “remix” button in the web-based code editor. Today, close to <a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/#projects">30%</a> of projects on Scratch are remixes.</p>
162. <p>Remixing plays such a central role in Scratch because its designers believed that remixing can play an important role in learning. After all, Scratch was designed first and foremost as a learning community with its roots in the <a href="http://web.media.mit.edu/~calla/web_comunidad/Reading-En/situating_constructionism.pdf">Constructionist framework</a> developed at <span class="caps">MIT</span> by Seymour Papert and his colleagues. The design of the Scratch online community was inspired by Papert’s <a href="https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6250">vision</a> of a learning community similar to Brazilian Samba schools (Henry Jenkins writes about his experience of Samba schools in the context of Papert’s vision <a href="http://henryjenkins.org/2011/11/what_samba_schools_can_teach_u.html">here</a>), and a <a href="http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Logoworks.html">comment</a> Marvin Minsky made in 1984:</p>
163. <blockquote>
164. <p>Adults worry a lot these days. Especially, they worry about how to make other people learn more about computers. They want to make us all “computer-literate.” Literacy means both reading and writing, but most books and courses about computers only tell you about writing programs. Worse, they only tell about commands and instructions and programming-language grammar rules. They hardly ever give examples. But real languages are more than words and grammar rules. There’s also literature – what people use the language for. No one ever learns a language from being told its grammar rules. We always start with stories about things that interest us.</p>
165. </blockquote>
166. <p>In a new paper — titled “<a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2819984">Remixing as a pathway to Computational Thinking</a>” — that was recently published at the <a href="http://cscw.acm.org/2016/"><span class="caps">ACM</span> Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work and Social Computing (<span class="caps">CSCW</span>)</a> conference, we used a series of quantitative measures of online behavior to try to uncover evidence that might support the theory that remixing in Scratch is positively associated with learning.</p>
167. <!-- ### Measuring code vocabulary -->
168.  
169. <p><img src="/images/blog/2016/remixing-learning/scratchblocks.png" class="img-responsive" alt="Scratch blocks"></p>
170. <p>Of course, because Scratch is an informal environment with no set path for users, no lesson plan, and no quizzes, measuring learning is an open problem. In our study, we built on two different approaches to measure learning in Scratch. The first approach considers the number of distinct types of programming blocks available in Scratch that a user has used over her lifetime in Scratch (there are 120 in total) — something that can be thought of as a block repertoire or vocabulary. This measure has been used to model informal learning in Scratch in an <a href="https://cs.gmu.edu/~carlotta/publications/LAS15.pdf">earlier study</a>. Using this approach, we hypothesized that <em>users who remix more will have a faster rate of growth for their code vocabulary</em>.</p>
171. <p>Controlling for a number of factors (e.g. age of user, the general level of activity) we found evidence of a small, but positive relationship between the number of remixes a user has shared and her block vocabulary as measured by the unique blocks she used in her non-remix projects. Intriguingly, we also found a strong association between the number of downloads by a user and her vocabulary growth. One interpretation is that this learning might also be associated with less active forms of appropriation, like the process of reading source code described by Minksy.</p>
172. <!-- ### Measuring the likelihood of using a programming concept -->
173.  
174. <p>The second approach we used considered specific concepts in programming, such as loops, or event-handling.  To measure this, we utilized a mapping of Scratch blocks to key programming concepts found in this <a href="http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/ct/files/AERA2012.pdf">paper</a> by Karen Brennan and Mitchel Resnick. For example, in the image below are all the Scratch blocks mapped to the concept of “loop”.</p>
175. <p><img src="/images/blog/2016/remixing-learning/scratchblocksct.png" class="img-responsive" alt="Scratch loop blocks"></p>
176. <p>We looked at six concepts in total (conditionals, data, events, loops, operators, and parallelism). In each case, we hypothesized that <em>if someone has had never used a given concept before, they would be more likely to use that concept after encountering it while remixing an existing project</em>.</p>
177. <p>Using this second approach, we found that users who had never used a concept were more likely to do so if they had been exposed to the concept through remixing. Although some concepts were more widely used than others, we found a positive relationship between concept use and exposure through remixing for each of the six concepts. We found that this relationship was true even if we ignored obvious examples of cutting and pasting of blocks of code. In all of these models, we found what we believe is evidence of learning through remixing.</p>
178. <!-- ### Looking ahead -->
179.  
180. <p>Of course, there are many limitations in this work. What we found are all positive correlations — we do not know if these relationships are causal. Moreover, our measures do not really tell us whether someone has “understood” the usage of a given block or programming concept.However, even with these limitations, we are excited by the results of our work, and we plan to build on what we have. Our next steps include developing and utilizing better measures of learning, as well as looking at other methods of appropriation like viewing the source code of a project.</p>
181. &lt;p&gt;The paper (and this blog post) is collaborative work with &lt;a href="https://mako.cc/academic/"&gt;Benjamin Mako Hill&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://www.andresmh.com"&gt;Andrés Monroy-Hernández&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="http://www.altsalt.net"&gt;William Hale&lt;/a&gt;. The paper is released as open access so anyone can read the entire paper &lt;a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2819984"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;</content><category term="Academic"></category><category term="academic"></category><category term="publishing"></category><category term="papers"></category><category term="cscw"></category></entry><entry><title>Marvin Minsky</title><link href="https://unmad.in/blog/2016/03/marvin-minsky/" rel="alternate"></link><published>2016-03-20T16:58:00-04:00</published><updated>2016-03-20T16:58:00-04:00</updated><author><name>Sayamindu Dasgupta</name></author><id>tag:unmad.in,2016-03-20:/blog/2016/03/marvin-minsky/</id><summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;Remembering Marvin&amp;nbsp;Minsky&lt;/p&gt;</summary><content type="html">&lt;p&gt;Last week, the Media Lab organized a memorial event for Marvin Minsky. The main event space had large life-size images of Marvin&amp;rsquo;s living room on all sides; I had been lucky enough to visit Marvin and Gloria a few times over the last three years (courtesy Brian Silverman and Cynthia Solomon), and I&amp;rsquo;m glad that the living room was an integral part of celebrating Marvin&amp;rsquo;s life and legacy. Each table in the post-event reception had a large pile of fortune cookies in the middle, and each of these fortune cookies had a &amp;ldquo;Marvinism&amp;rdquo; inside. Here&amp;rsquo;s an example (Hiroshi Ishii &lt;a href="https://twitter.com/ishii_mit/status/711584325515534336"&gt;tweeted&lt;/a&gt; a list of all the Marvinisms in the&amp;nbsp;cookies):&lt;/p&gt;
182. <p><img src="/images/blog/2016/marvin-minsky/marvinism-cookie.jpg" class="img-responsive" alt="Marvinism fortune cookie"></p>
183. &lt;p&gt;For those who can read Bangla, I also wrote a short piece on Marvin for the &amp;ldquo;Bigyan&amp;rdquo; (বিজ্ঞান) e-zine; you can read it &lt;a href="http://bigyan.org.in/2016/03/15/marvin-minsky/"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;</content><category term="Academic"></category><category term="academic"></category><category term="marvin minsky"></category><category term="remembrances"></category></entry></feed>

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