Sayamindu Dasgupta

Remixing as a Pathway to Computational Thinking

Theorists and advocates of “remixing” have suggested that appropriation can act as a pathway for learning. We test this theory quantitatively using data from more than 2.4 million multimedia programming projects shared by more than 1 million users in the Scratch online community. First, we show that users who remix more often have larger repertoires of programming commands even after controlling for the numbers of projects and amount of code shared. Second, we show that exposure to computational thinking concepts through remixing is associated with increased likelihood of using those concepts. Our results support theories that young people learn through remixing, and have important implications for designers of social computing systems.

Rope Revolution: tangible and gestural rope interface for collaborative play

In this paper we describe Rope Revolution, a rope-based gaming system for collaborative play. After identifying popular rope games and activities around the world, we developed a generalized tangible rope interface that includes a compact motion-sensing and force-feedback module that can be used for a variety of rope-based games. Rope Revolution is designed to foster both co-located and remote collaborative experiences by using actual rope to connect players in physical activities across virtual spaces. Results from this study suggest that a tangible user interface with rich metaphors and physical feedback help enhance the gaming experience in addition to helping remote players feel connected across distances. We use this design as an example to motivate discussion on how to take advantage of the various physical affordances of common objects to build a generalized tangible interface for remote play.

RopePlus: bridging distances with social and kinesthetic rope games

Rope-based games such as jump rope, tug-of-war, and kite-flying promote physical activity and social interaction among people of all ages and especially in children during the development of their coordination skills and physical fitness. Our RopePlus system builds on those traditional games by enabling players to participate remotely through interacting with ropes that connect physical and virtual spaces. The RopePlus platform is centered around the rope as a tangible interface with various hardware extensions to allow for multiple playing modes. In this paper, we present two games that have been implemented in detail: a kite-flying game called Multi-Fly and a jump-rope game called Multi-Jump. Our work aims to expand tangible interface gaming to real time social playing environments.

Engaging novices in programming, experimenting, and learning with data

write computer programs that can efficiently deal with large data sets. Understanding and managing data sets is increasingly becoming an integral part of not only our professional lives, but also of our personal lives, as we record and analyze our daily activities with fitness trackers, share data in various forms with our friends and acquaintances through social networks, etc. Most introductory computer science and programming courses that are taught today, however, focus on the “process” aspect of programming, focusing on algorithmic concepts and related areas such as flow of control and rarely on data. While these concepts form the fundamental pillars of programming, as a side effect of this trend, toolkits for novice programmers rarely deal with data, beyond relatively simple uses of variables, lists, and key-value pairs. Also, most introductory computer science lesson plans and computational thinking frameworks do not go much beyond spreadsheets and pen-and-paper surveys when it comes to computational explorations of data. In this article, we discuss some of the emerging opportunities that promise to enable a much wider variety of computational projects around data, especially at the introductory level. We describe these opportunities in the context of our ongoing and upcoming work with Scratch [8], a visual block-based programming language and online community developed by our research group at the MIT Media Lab. And, we describe a number of new data-oriented features in Scratch and discuss how they influence the ways in which children think about the world. Scratch has been designed especially for young programmers We describe a number of new and upcoming initiatives within the Scratch project that focus on introducing programming with data to young programmers. These initiatives are placed in the context of emerging opportunities and trends in computing such as the cloud, open data initiatives, and ubiquitous sensor devices. We describe how the initiatives take advantage of these trends to enable young programmers to think not just about data, but also about the role of data in their world through computational projects that are personally engaging and meaningful.

From surveys to collaborative art: enabling children to program with online data

Being able to store and access data online enables a wide range of creative possibilities, starting from surveys to collaborative art, from global high-score-lists for games to real-time chat-rooms. While end-user tools in these categories are increasingly becoming available to children, what is still missing is the opportunity for children to program and create such systems. Causes behind this lack of opportunity include, among other things, high barriers to entry due to complex client-server technologies, as well as hard to understand topics such as access control, etc. This paper presents Cloud data-structures -- a feature in the online visual language Scratch 2.0 that enables children to programmatically store and retrieve data online. While standard data-structures are stored in memory, for Cloud variants, all operations (and data) on the data-structure are additionally sent to remote servers over the Internet. This has two consequences for a given Scratch 2.0 project: (1) Cloud data-structures are persistent across multiple execution instances, and (2) they are shared between simultaneous instances. This paper describes the motivations behind, and the design of Cloud data-structures, along with case studies describing projects created by children with this system, with a focus on the learning outcomes.

Scratch Community Blocks: Supporting Children as Data Scientists

In this paper, we present Scratch Community Blocks, a new system that enables children to programmatically access, analyze, and visualize data about their participation in Scratch, an online community for learning computer programming. At its core, our approach involves a shift in who analyzes data: from adult data scientists to young learners themselves. We first introduce the goals and design of the system and then demonstrate it by describing example projects that illustrate its functionality. Next, we show through a series of case studies how the system engages children in not only representing data and answering questions with data but also in self-reflection about their own learning and participation.

Extending Scratch: New pathways into programming

We present the Scratch extension system, a toolkit that enables anyone to extend the vocabulary of the visual Scratch programming language through custom programming blocks written in JavaScript. The extension system is designed to (i) enable innovating on the Scratch programming language itself, in addition to innovating with it through projects, and (ii) enable the creation of new interest-driven pathways into Scratch programming. In this paper, we describe some of the prior work done in this space, our design and implementation, open questions and challenges, and some preliminary outcomes.

Youth Perspectives on Critical Data Literacies

As contemporary youth learn, play, and socialize online, their activities are often being recorded and analyzed. What should young people know about these data collection and analysis efforts? Although critiques of these new forms of data collection and analysis have grown increasingly loud, the voices of users, and particularly youth, have largely been absent. This paper explores the critical perspectives of youth who are programming with public data about their own learning and social interaction in the Scratch online community. Using a bottom-up approach based on ethnographic observation of discussions among these young users, we identify a series of themes in how these youth critique, question, and debate the implications of data analytics. We connect these themes-framed in terms of critical data literacies-to expert critiques and discuss the implications of these findings for education and design.

Block-based programming with Scratch community data: A position paper

In this position paper, I describe the rationale behind, and the early design of Scratch Data Blocks - a Scratch-based block-programming toolkit that allows Scratch users to program with public data from the Scratch online community.