Motivating programmers via an online community

Motivation is one of the decisive factors in the process of learning to program. This paper describes the Greenfoot Gallery, a project created to increase motivation of beginning programmers. The Greenfoot Gallery is a community driven web site that allows the publication of programming projects created with the Greenfoot environment. In this paper, we especially describe and discuss community communication patterns via commenting on the site, and possible effects of these on student motivation.