This project's aim is to understand collaboration, cooperation, and learning in the context of a large, distributed virtual organization consisting of children and teachers building web-based simulations and animations using the Scratch software. The PIs will study the nature and patterns of cooperation in the Scratch decentralized learning environment, establish principles to guide the development of systems that foster cooperative attitudes and behaviors, and develop strategies to cultivate computational-thinking capacities that are important for productive cooperation and problem-solving in virtual organizations. The Scratch community consists of over 400,000 registered members discussing, remixing, and reusing more than a million projects. The project is a collaborative project with researchers from MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania drawn from computer science, psychology, child development, education, organizational science, and economics.
Using a novel combination of experimental and ethnographic methods, the research will provide insights into how young people cooperate in virtual organizations, their attitudes and motivations related to cooperation, and their development of computational-thinking skills and capacities necessary for productive cooperation and creative learning. The researchers expect that the findings will contribute to the design and understanding of more effective virtual organizations, particularly in the areas of learning, education, and cooperative creation. The methods used include observational studies, design interventions, and field experiments. The test bed will be the Scratch community and the evaluations will be done by mining the online record of cooperation in the construction of new simulations and animations.
The outcomes of the project will include an improved Scratch environment, design principles for the construction of distributed virtual organizations that encourage cooperation and co-construction of knowledge and artifacts, and new methods of teaching computational thinking in an engaging environment. The Scratch community of 400,000 members will be part of this work. This project is potentially transformative because of the engaging nature of this particular application, because of its applicability to similar virtual communities, and because of its promise to reach a diverse community of learners.
This project studied how new forms of cooperation in online communities can serve as a basis for fundamental changes in learning and education – transforming what young people learn, how they learn, where they learn, and whom they learn with. In particular, the project supported and studied cooperation within the Scratch online community, where young people (ages 8 and up) program and share interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations, using the Scratch graphical programming language (http://scratch.mit.edu). Millions of young people around the world are now using Scratch to play, discuss, experiment with, collaborate on, and remix one another’s projects. In the process, they are developing computational-thinking skills and capacities that are essential for productive cooperation and creative problem-solving in today’s society. In collaboration with researchers from the MIT Media Lab and the University of Pennsylvania, the Harvard University research team: Analyzed the role of remixing in the Scratch community, including: the process of remixing (e.g., common patterns of remixing), the conditions that encourage or inhibit remixing, and the attitudes of community members towards remixing; Designed new activities, under the framework of "Collab Camp," to support and study new ways for members of the Scratch community to work together as teams (known as "collabs" in the community); Launched a new model of online data sharing, known as "cloud data," enabling young people to create new types of projects (such as online surveys, collaborative drawing tools, and games with high-scores lists) and to grapple with important data-science issues (such as privacy and safety); Released data from the first five years of the Scratch online community (including data from 2 million projects and 10 million projects), so that researchers at other organizations can join in the study of collaboration and learning patterns in the Scratch community; Studied the role of intrinsic motivation in online learning, examining how and why participation in the Scratch community has continued to expand rapidly without the use of points, badges, and other extrinsic incentive structures; Explored how sharing and collaboration in the Scratch online community can broaden participation in creative computational activities, providing a motivating context for learners of many different ages, gender, expertise, and backgrounds. These research activities have resulted in new strategies for supporting collaboration and the development of computational thinking for youth in online communities. The findings have been shared through educational-research, computer-science, and other interdisciplinary publications and conferences. Though the research focused specifically on the Scratch online community, the results can inform the design of other online creative communities, providing insights and best practices for cultivating cooperation, learning, and computational thinking among diverse groups of participants.
