Author: Emilia Gan

As today’s youth come of age in an increasingly data-driven world, the development of new literacies is increasingly important. Young people need both skills to work with, analyze, and interpret data, as well as an understanding of the complex social issues surrounding the collection and use of data. But how can today’s youth develop the skills they need?

We will exploring this question during an upcoming workshop on Imagining Future Designs of Tools for Youth Data Literacies, one of the offerings at this year’s Connected Learning Summit. As co-organizers for this workshop, we are motivated by our interest in how young people learn to work with and understand data. We are also curious about how other people working in this area define the term ‘data literacy’ and what they feel are the most critical skills for young people to learn. As there are a number of great tools available to help young people learn about and use data, we  also hope to explore which features of these tools made them most effective. We are looking forward to discussions on all of these issues during the workshops.

This workshop promises to be an engaging discussion of existing tools available to help young people work with and understand data (Session 1) and an exploration of what future tools might offer (Session 2). We invite all researchers, educators, and other practitioners to join us for one or both of these sessions. We’re hoping for all attendees to come away with a deeper understanding of data literacies and how to support youth in developing data literacy skills.

Information on registering for the Connected Learning Summit available at: https://connectedlearningsummit.org/

To register interest in attending the Youth Data Literacies Workshop, please complete the pre-registration form at: http://dataliteracies.com/

The workshop is organized by Community Data Science Collective members Regina Cheng, Stefania Druga, Emilia Gan, and Benjamin Mako Hill in collaboration with Rahul Bhargava, Tamara Clegg, Catherine D’Ignazio, Yasmin Kafai, Victor Lee, Camillia Matuk, and Andee Rubin.

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 40 million children from around the world have created accounts on the Scratch online community 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 girls.

In a recently published paper, I worked with several colleagues from the Community Data Science Collective 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.

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!

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.

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

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This blog post and the paper are collaborative work with Benjamin Mako Hill and Sayamindu Dasgupta. You can find more details about our methodology and results in the text of our paper, “Gender, Feedback, and Learners’ Decisions to Share Their Creative Computing Projects” which is freely available and published open access in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2 (CSCW): 54:1-54:23.