Community galleries are destructive?

[Neil Fraser]

Scratch has a gallery of projects and Blockly Games has similar galleries of drawings and movies.  The idea is to allow students to learn from each other, get new ideas, and be proud of publishing their work.  All great things.  Obviously there are issues around inappropriate content, but that's well understood.

However, observing my own daughter has revealed behaviour that makes me rethink the wisdom of galleries.  Once she found the galleries, she stopped programming and got sucked into playing low-quality Scratch games, or doom-scrolling.  They changed her from a producer to a consumer.

For some organizations this is fantastic because it increases all sorts of great metrics.  Length of visits, repeat visits, engagement, etc.  But it's quite destructive to the metric that should matter the most: education.  Does anyone have ideas about how one could structure a gallery such that it doesn't become a black hole that sucks students in?

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Neil Fraser, Switzerland
https://neil.fraser.name

[Vetrivel Shanmugam]

Yes. Pen and paper is a healthy alternative. Takes a little courage to chase it

[Max Stephen Russell]

Scratch’s About page includes several claims such as “free, playful, and powerful creative learning”. This emphasis is in direct contradiction with what you are describing with your daughter, and which any of us should be able to believe and understand. Not that the About page claim is not true, but it is not what is happening with somebody’s daughter.

Then I look at the categories and filters in the gallery and ask, Why is there an “All” choice, and Why is a child with any significant degree of creativity and drive being presented with another point of indecision regarding “Trending” and “Popular”?

And then—or from the very beginning of design—if I worked at Scratch, I would make sure the point of entry into the website is integrally tied to the purpose and desire to LEARN and CREATE. If someone then replied, “But that’s why we’re showing them all these examples of what other kids have accomplished,” I would say, “When I visit the great galleries in this country, I am not subjected to everything under the sun.”

So if I was working at Scratch, I would say instead of accidentally becoming a YouTube knockoff, let’s have kids earn rewards as creators, and thereby increase the number and quality of other people’s Exhibitions that they can study and appreciate. Or some such method of inspiration and control, all of this being a guarantee of a purposeful, reliable and productive learning environment from logging in . . . to clicking on anything . . . to logging out. I would not allow for a single black hole.

-Steve Russell