Constructionist approaches have favored children’s learning designing games and software applications because of their social and personal relevance. Designing interactive stories and animations have been seen as equally motivational but less successful in promoting the sophisticated forms of computational thinking and participation that are a prominent part of newly emerging social networking forums for online creative communities. In this paper, we examine two promising aspects of online creative collaboratives for learning in Scratch community: (1) how learning programming can emerge alongside creative expression in collaboratively designed interactive stories, and (2) how feedback can shape the artistic and computational qualities of stories between draft and final project online submissions. The analyses focused on changes in drafts and final projects by examining quantity and quality of media elements and program code in a collaborative story telling activity in Scratch online community. Findings indicate that online collaborative creative storytelling and constructive feedback provided on drafts by community and Scratch team members have the potential to generate both more complex story designs and code development. In the discussion we address the implications for designing creative collaboration that situate programming and media designs in mutually supportive ways.

In this paper we examine the possibilities of applying predictive analysis to users' written communication via comments in an open-ended online social networking forum: Scratch.mit.edu. Scratch is primarily used by youth ages 8-16 years to program software like games, animations, and stories; their social interactions take place around commenting, remixing, and sharing computer programs (called projects). This exploratory work contributes to work in educational data mining by broadly describing and comparing comments about projects versus other topics in Scratch. Referencing communication accommodation theory, we found that user comments about projects exhibited different linguistic cues than other comments, and these cues were successfully used to classify comment topic. Further, results also suggest that project comments embody richer language than other comments. This suggests several future avenues for research on youth's online comments about programming and other technical projects that may reveal educational opportunities in creating and sharing projects.