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

[co...@cortscorner.net]

I have taught workshops using Scratch and have observed much of the same. Once the kids discovers the galleries, coding becomes a chore that they quickly rush through before going back to playing someone else's Scratch game.

I would opine that one of the reason is that many of the games in the gallery are very high quality. This means that...

1) They are pretty engaging. The kids find them hard to put down once they start or see someone else play.

2) They are very hard for the kids to replicate.

When I see kids playing something like "Geometry Dash" on scratch, I would offer to teach them how to build their own. Out of 20 kids, maybe 19 would rather just play (...easy way out). The last kid will try, then give up after a while as the game they make are trying to make would be clearly far inferior. The high quality games on Scratch are setting too high a bar for the kids to replicate (...are they even made by kids? Some of the games on Scratch involves the use of college level mathematics).

One thing that have helped (...with limited success), is to create my own gallery of students' work and to direct the kids focus on that gallery instead. The students' work are... not very fun (...but still great work for kids!), and generally simple enough that a kid could look at it and think "I could do better than that". Kids who have played games made by their peers, are more likely to try and make their own game compared to kids who played games from the public gallery.

Perhaps instead of a public gallery, it would be better to have a class specific gallery curated by an educator. The educator can then pick out example work which demonstrates skills that are just slightly ahead of their current class.