Media designs with scratch: what urban youth can learn about programming in a computer Clubhouse

We report on the programming learning experiences of urban youth ages 8-18 at a Computer Clubhouse located in South Central Los Angeles. Our analyses of the 536 Scratch projects, collected during a two-year period, documents the learning of key programming concepts in the absence of instructional interventions or experienced mentors. We discuss the motivations of urban youth who choose to program in Scratch and the implications for introducing programming at after school settings in underserved communities. Numerous approaches to broadening participation in computing have been discussed in K-12 and college education, such as mentoring, revised curricula, tool development outreach programs, and programming courses for non-majors (Margolis & Fisher, 2003). A surprisingly neglected area of research is the learning of programming in community technology centers. In these venues, the learning of programming is more casual and takes place at the discretion of the learner rather than part of a formal curriculum. Such out-of-school activities also present opportunities for youth to succeed who may not flourish in traditional school environments. As a case in point, we focus on the use of Scratch (see Figure 1 or www.scratch.mit.edu), a block-based programming language designed to facilitate media manipulation for novice programmers (Resnick, Kafai, & Maeda, 2003), at a Computer Clubhouse—an urban community technology center (Resnick, Rusk, & Cooke, 1998). Scratch is not the first programming environment aimed at novice programmers (for an extensive overview, see Kelleher & Pausch, 2005). It follows the Logo tradition (Papert, 1980) but emphasizes media manipulation and supports youths’ interests, such as creating animated stories, games, and interactive presentations. The Scratch vocabulary of roughly 90 commands includes commands for relative motion like the Logo turtle, image transformations, cell animation, recorded-sound playback, musical note and drum sounds, and a programmable pen, in addition to standard control structures, global and local variables, and simple Boolean operations. During a period of two years, we collected youths’ Scratch projects, which included animations, digital art, and games, on a weekly basis in order to track which programming concepts were taking root in the Clubhouse culture over time. As information sources for this study, we exported project summary files, which contained text-based information such as the date, file name, and author of the project as well as information about the number and types of commands that were used and the total number of stacks, sounds, and costumes used in the project. During the study, mentors were regularly at the site. The mentors had little or no experience programming and were new to Scratch (Kafai, Desai, Peppler, Chiu, & Moya, 2008).