A qualitative study of animation programming in the wild

Scratch is the latest iteration in a series of animation tools aimed at teaching programming skills. Scratch, in particular, aims not only to teach technical skills, but also skills related to collaboration and code reuse. In order to assess the strengths and weaknesses of Scratch relative to these goals, we have performed an empirical field study of Scratch animations and associated user comments from the online animation repository. Overall, we found that Scratch represents substantial progress toward its designers' goals, though we also identified several opportunities for significant improvement. In particular, many Scratch programs revealed significant technical mastery of the programming environment by programmers, and some animations even demonstrated design patterns. On the other hand, while the Scratch repository has successfully served as a supportive environment for generating constructive feedback among users, we did not find any occasions within our sample where this interaction led to online collaboration. In addition, we found low levels of code reuse, in terms of both frequency and success. Based on these results, we identify implications for improving the design of animation tools, for using these tools to teach programming skills, and for fostering successful collaboration and code reuse among end-user programmers.

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