Kafai/Connected Code: Why Children Need to Learn Programming

important elements of Papert’s dream remain unfulfilled. Papert envisioned a world in which children would not only interact with premade computer applications but would design, create, and program with computational media—and, in the process, learn important problem-solving skills and project-design strategies. What happened to Papert’s dream?

Kafai and Burke’s conception of computational participation serves as a broader, more inclusive framework for computer science education, expanding beyond individual problem solving to include personal expression, creative design, and social engagement.

the project was founded on an idea that was unusual at that time—that children should (and could) program computers. Inside Project Headlight, the computers were arranged in circles in a large space near various classrooms rather than being closeted away

Computers—desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices—have tangibly and personally become extensions of ourselves,3 and coding, once solely the erudite pastime of techies, is now being recognized by educators and theorists as a crucial skill, even a new literacy, for all children.

The premise is that by learning to think like a computer scientist, students can solve everyday problems, design systems that we all use in daily life, and progress and innovate in other disciplines.5

Computational thinking

Computational thinking has now become an umbrella term for computer science’s contributions to reasoning and communicating in an increasingly digital world. Despite the emergence of computational thinking as a conceptual framing for teaching programming, however, the revival of programming is not being led by either educators or promoters of computational thinking.

One significant push for programming’s resurgence has come from an unexpected source—the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos that is characteristic of digital youth cultures. Computers now are accessible inside and outside of school, and children use their personal machines to innovate with technology by creating their own video games, interactive art projects, and even programmable clothes through electronic textiles. The same computers on which they create these homespun items also connect them to wider networks of other young users who share common interests and the commitment to “doing it ourselves” through a mutual DIY ethic.

Most children use their devices—whether laptop, iPad, iPhone, or Droid—to consume commercial media. Computers may have become extensions of ourselves, but to what extent are we teaching children how to design and manage these extensions? How do we help children become producers and not just consumers of digital media? What role should programming play in facilitating

Those who would like to return programming to the schools need to articulate an argument that extends beyond the common desire to make children more rigorous thinkers.

Programming is a form of participating in social networks (Computational participation)

Programming is a form of expressing oneself and of participating in social networks and communities.

Computational participation focuses on the practices and perspectives that are needed to contribute within wider social networks, including but not limited to schools. Within the wider network of creative and critical thinkers, educators have the chance to take the “geek” out of “geeking out” and set new academic and social norms for what it means to use technology meaningful.

2001, when Scratch was in an early development phase, Mitchel Resnick, John Maloney, and Natalie Rusk at the MIT Media Lab and Yasmin Kafai, then at UCLA, submitted a grant to the National Science Foundation based on the idea of developing a new programming language for young people who participated in the Intel Computer Clubhouse Network.

The idea was to develop a programming language that builds on the media practices that already were favored by youth in their leisure time. This language would allow participants to make graphics, animations, and games.

When Andrés Monroy-Hernández, then a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, created the online community where Scratch programs could be shared on the Internet, he called it “Scratchr,” referencing the newly popular Flickr site where millions of people shared and annotated their own digital photos. At what eventually became Scratch.mit.edu,

wider shift from computational thinking to computational participation. Scratch users (or “Scratchers,” as they are known on the website) found that the online community

Scratch’s origin as a tool and its shift to a popular community speak to the wider shift from computational thinking to computational participation. Scratch users (or “Scratchers,” as they are known on the website) found that the online community is as much a tool as the software itself (see chapter 4). Being able to share ideas within the Forums sections, “friend” each other based on mutual interests, and remix others’ work at the website are all fundamental tools by which to produce digital media (see chapter 5).

Сетевое сообщество является таким же средством, поддерживающим деятельность, как и само программное средство.

Scratch 2.0 blurs the division between the tool (Scratch as downloadable software) and the community (the online site). Users now are able to code and communicate at a single, cloud-based site. Likewise, to encourage participation, entirely new venues of creation extend beyond the screen. These include tangible construction kits that allow users to create their own interface (whether plastic, word, or any other material) and then hook up these homemade devices to program keys. Budding designers create their own touchpads and interface devices with alligator clips connected to conductive materials, including their own body (see chapter 6).

I found particular pleasure in such systems as the differential gear, which does not follow a simple linear chain of causality since the motion in the transmission shaft can be distributed in many different ways to the two wheels depending on what resistance they encounter. I believe that working with differentials did more for my mathematical development than anything I was taught in elementary school. Gears, serving as models, carried many otherwise abstract ideas into my head.

He argues that the protean quality of the computer could allow it to become a universal construction material for learners to design and build objects. Rather than turning computers into teaching machines, children themselves would become programmers of the machine.

Papert, like Jean Piaget, saw learning as building knowledge structures,3 but he added an important dimension: the artifacts of the mind have to move into the public world, where they can be examined, shared, and valued by others. In many ways, this view was prescient of the vast and distributed networks of digital objects and communities that comprise the Internet. It reflects the foundation for doing, thinking, and interacting—in short, learning—with any medium.

programming languages Basic and later Pascal were equally prominent in many schools, and there was considerable debate about which programming language was best

Logo

Logo was not the first and only programming language used by children. The programming languages Basic and later Pascal were equally prominent in many schools, and there was considerable debate about which programming language was best for schools. But in contrast to Basic and many other programming languages, Logo promised to offer more than just learning about programming: it taught mathematics, cybernetics, and science in new ways and also provided a pedagogy. These additions made Logo unlike any other programming language and became the precursor to Scratch. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, most young programmers were writing program text by manipulating arrays of numbers or symbols.

continues Logo’s idea of providing a programmable object, replacing the turtle with the orange cartoon Scratch cat. The most significant difference between Logo and Scratch is not each language’s iconic mascots but how Scratch allows budding programmers to use snapable bricks rather than text to create movement, animation, and sound on the screen.

NetLogo and StarLogo, for example, have expanded Logo to run massively parallel programs on the computer: hundreds if not thousands of turtles can function simultaneously and interact with each other. These versions of Logo create microworlds for complex systems, helping learners to understand how unique complex behavior patterns can emerge from the overlapping interactions between many simple objects. Rather than watching and interacting with complex systems that were designed by others, learners can better understand such relationships by programming such simulations and designing computer games, animated stories, and robots (described in

Object to think with

Objects or artifacts play a central role in this process. Papert coined the term “objects-to-think-with” for objects in the physical and digital world (such as programs, robots, and games) that can become objects in the mind for constructing, examining, and revising connections between old and new knowledge (more about this in chapter 3). “Objects-to-think-with” (such as the Logo turtle) are particularly effective at supporting appropriation because they facilitate the learners’ identification with the object. By designing a program or game (or its procedures, algorithms, and data structures), the personal knowledge

Affinity culture - objects-to-share-with

More recently, gaming researcher Jim Gee (см. Семантика_видео-игр) has identified the importance of affinity cultures that are formed in gaming communities and the ways that this alternative learning environment offers an important lens by which to reevaluate schooling.

In all learning communities, effective participation requires learners to search out, organize, and distribute responsibilities by collaborating with others as they engage in activities or create artifacts together. The collaborative agency that is required of learners emphasizes the active role that learners take in constructing community that builds knowledge and also designs artifacts that can be shared with others. The proverbial “objects-to-think-with” become “objects-to-share-with,” representing products and ethos of collaboration and learning in the communities. Programming is not just a cognitive skill that is used to design code. It also is a social and cultural skill that is used to participate in groups.

Во всех обучающихся сообществах эффективное участие требует, чтобы учащиеся искали, организовывали и распределяли обязанности, сотрудничая с другими, когда они участвуют в деятельности или создают артефакты вместе. Сотрудничающая субъектность, которая требуется от учащихся, подчеркивает активную роль, которую учащиеся берут в построении сообщества, которое строит знания, а также проектирует артефакты, которые могут быть переданы другим. Пресловутые «объекты для мышления» становятся «объектами для совместного использования», представляя продукты и принципы сотрудничества и обучения в сообществах. Программирование - это не только когнитивный навык, который используется для разработки кода. Это также социальное и культурное мастерство, которое используется для участия в группах.

The goal is to design both learning technologies and environments that provide the person and not the computer with agency. There is a constant tension between agency (what learners do) and structure (how the context is constrained). From a connected learning perspective, the more freedom that teachers offer learners, the more they need to think about the boundaries of the established learning environment.

The key to good teaching is finding this balance between structure and agency, which is the great challenge of education in all its forms.

Students were learning programming in schools without necessarily realizing that they were learning programming. Rather than learning about code by listening to lectures and doing drills with conditionals, loops, and variables, students were learning about programming code by designing their own software applications.

the teaching and learning of programming need to be integrated with regular class work and other subject matters, provide a context for explanations, and foster personal relevance among students. In fact, the criticisms directed toward programming and specifically Logo—lack of sufficient time, complexity, and personal applicability—could be leveled against many other curricular activities in school, not just programming.

applications. Making and sharing online are no longer purely technical skills but are increasingly social skills, and computer programming has again returned to schools not as an eclectic technology course but as a literacy skill.

The findings from Caperton’s software design study and from Ching’s apprenticeship study illustrate that treating students as designers of instructional software applications leads them to feel more invested in their own learning.

Scratch Writers’ Workshop

The Scratch Writers’ Workshop, designed by Quinn Burke, leverages some of the previous successes with storytelling to teach programming. The workshop considers state standards in language arts instruction and emphasizes the composition process rather than the final product or submitted deliverable. Rather than focusing on digital stories as the coded output, as previous studies did, the goal is to apply the writing workshop model to the coding process by having students compose their own digital stories through a series of designated stages.

Results were promising. Over 90 percent of students completed their own digital stories using Scratch, and the narratives utilized a wide range of language arts tropes (such as static and dynamic characterization) and programming features (such as loops). A number of participants developed plotlines that were based on

This research suggests that stories can spur children’s interest in coding and that the Scratch Writers’ Workshop represents a way to demystify the coding process for students and teachers by presenting it as a series of practical and interrelated steps.

partnership with the National Writing Project is based on such a premise. Their workshops for literacy teachers emphasize their role as “makers” within the classroom and student writing as a tangible “product” in which the technical and creative are intertwined. Digital stories are systematically coded images and sounds that are placed in aesthetic juxtaposition, and digital stories in Scratch are likewise “products”

Scratch was designed as a media production tool so that young people in Computer Clubhouses could program their own applications for games, digital stories, simulations, interactive art, dance videos, or other genres of work that they already loved to do.

“Scratch can do almost anything. It has hundreds of controls, hundreds of images, and you can even take ones off the Internet.… And so all you need to do is have a focus.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in the proliferation of video game-making competitions such as Globaloria’s Globey Awards, Advanced Micro Devices’ AMD Changing the Game contest, the Games for Change Awards, as well as the National STEM Video Game Design Challenge (cosponsored by the White House). These competitions instill a sense of empowerment, both personal and social, that participants can make what they use, and this empowerment is characteristic of the self-reliance and drive of the

The founders—ages eight, thirteen, and fifteen—soon created a video game entitled “Pearl Harbor” that functioned like a digital version of the classic Battleship. The sophistication of the game’s graphics and the ease of game play attracted hundreds of views and downloads on its initial release. Multiple remixes of the project soon followed. As Green Bear Productions explains at its website, “we had a lot of people who wanted to join us,” and membership within the group jumped to eighteen.

Programming is a communal affair

Programming, once largely perceived as an individual (even asocial) activity, was unexpectedly becoming a communal affair on the Scratch

Seymour Papert always considered learning to be a communal practice and cited his experiences with Brazil’s samba schools as a model for a more natural and socialized experience to learn any technical skill.3 For Papert, learning the technique of the complicated samba was not simply a matter of skill-and-drill memorization but was linked to the experience of socializing in dance halls.

This rigidly individualistic approach that is characteristic of schools is unlike the approach that is used in the software industry itself, in which developers generally spend 30 percent of their time working alone, 50 percent working with one other person, and 20 percent working with two or more people.

A walk around one of Google’s or Apple’s development offices reveals the social nature of software development: hallways are expansive, doorways are wide and free of doors, and walls are glass. Rather than stifling interaction, the architectural design of such spaces encourages it.

When Papert introduced Logo as a tool to make programming more intuitive and sociable for children, he unwittingly launched a veritable cottage industry of introductory programming languages based on his model. Nearly two hundred different variations of Logo have emerged so far with more still in development—including variants like Cricket Logo (which applies the Logo language to programmable hand-held robotic toys), Terrapin Logo (which allows the inclusion of multivoice music), and Logo3D (which adds an entirely new dimension to the original two-dimensional output).

Boxer

Science educator Andrea diSessa’s Boxer programming language built on the Logo model but introduced clickable “boxes” as the site of programming commands, shifting code from a series of typed lines to a number of juxtaposed and interrelated coded boxes.

Emile

Computer scientist Mark Guzdial promoted embedded graphical scaffolds in Emile, a programming environment that helped beginners to grasp coding concepts via a concrete, step-by-step approach. Such hands-on graphical illustration is often necessary for beginning programmers, Guzdial points out, because they need tools that make code less cumbersome in terms of syntax, more responsive in terms of output, and more personally relevant in terms of end products. The element of personal relevance is crucial.

Low floor - High ceilings -Wide walls - New Windows

• Low floors: The tool must be intuitive enough to allow new users to acclimate to it gradually and with a degree of confidence.
• High ceilings: The tool must allow experienced users to create increasingly complex applications that grow more intricate and nuanced as their proficiency in using the tool increases.
• Wide walls: The tool must allow for a wide range of projects, let users tap into elements of personal experience and popular culture, and let them design and develop programs that are unique and represent their own interests and backgrounds.
• But despite the importance of these three elements, the real shift is the opening of new communities, or windows (if we continue with a fourth element of the house metaphor), to facilitate creating digital media. The creation of digital communities represents the new frontier in terms of making computer programming a more accessible skill for youth. Where and how do children look to share the applications that they create? And perhaps even more important, where and how do they look to learn to make applications? Community has always been tacitly recognized as one of the key

Educators have used notions of “communities of practice” as well as “affinity groups” and “affinity spaces” to try to understand the role that is played by social interplay in the learning process. This focus on community relates directly to the rise of the Internet as a new way to interact with others. As the Web has evolved, society’s comprehension of what is meant by the notion of community has shifted tremendously in a very short amount of time. Chatrooms, massive multiplayer online role-playing games, and social networks (such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) are examples of communities that are virtual but have roots in the physical presence of daily life. The capacity to build is another characteristic of Web 2.0 technology.

MOOSE Crossing

Despite the lack of the graphics and animations that characterize today’s online worlds, MOOSE Crossing was unique at that time. It was the first online educational platform to engage young users by allowing them to interact with their peers online and to add to the virtual domain by programming their own characters, animals, and rooms within the castle—each of which had programmable parameters. Within MOOSE Crossing, children learned programming within a networked community.

MOOSE Crossing design principles

Bruckman focused on principles for creating meaningful online communities for learning programming at earlier ages:

• Maximize each individual’s opportunities for creative expression and active participation.
• Assume that average people are smarter and more creative than what is typically assumed.
• Encourage users to be creators of content, and maintain quality by enforcing a minimal set of community standards.
• Develop an infrastructure for community support for learning.

These four points are not the only guidelines for designing meaningful online spaces for learning programming, and they represent design principles that apply to many scenarios, not just creating spaces to learn programming online.

Dubbed “the YouTube of interactive media,” the Scratch website currently has 1.5 million registered members (referred to as “Scratchers”), and they have uploaded over 3 million projects since its launch in 2007. Scratchers range in age from five to seventy, but most members fall between the ages of eleven and twenty-one. The mean age of Scratchers is fifteen.

Other tools communities

Other introductory programming tools are following Scratch’s lead.

• The programming language Alice team, for example, is developing the Looking Glass Community as an online extension of its game tool.
• The for-profit commercial developments of Microsoft’s Kodu https://www.kodugamelab.com/
  • https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/kodu/
  • https://worlds.kodugamelab.com/browse
  • http://kodugamelab.wikia.com/wiki/Kodu_Game_Lab_Community
• Recreational Design Software’s Game-Maker tools have developed online communities since 2012.

Papert’s assessment of the Logo turtle as an “object-to-think-with” may now be replaced with these programmable and shareable applications as “objects-to-share-with.”30 To make is to connect,31 and these programmable applications are devices that have real currency and relevance in society’s growing

Scratch team members recently have focused on using basic encouragement and attribution via the Comments feature to welcome new users to the site and encourage them to explore projects online with the personal connections that are possible through the Comments section.

An examination of 2.2 million projects at the Scratch site showed that the 20 percent most-viewed Scratchers received 95.6 percent of views, and the other 80 percent of Scratchers received 4.4 percent of views.48 Recognizing these steep discrepancies in collaboration and participation,

In 2010, a new Scratch research focus on collaboration and computation in a networked commons looked at how learning to program and learning to participate could be mutually beneficial.

Open to the entire community, the first Collab Challenge ran from January to early March 2011. Each team needed to have a minimum of two participants; integrate three unique, preselected images into its projects; upload an initial draft midway through the competition to receive constructive feedback from the Scratch team; and submit a final project three weeks later.

total of fifty-two collab teams (139 participants) registered to participate in the initial Collab Challenge in January 2011. About 41.7 percent of the participants were relative newcomers to the community, and 48 percent of the participants had been on Scratch for more than three months.Comments made by experienced Scratchers suggest that the Challenge stimulated renewed interest in participating in the online community. One Scratcher who had been with the community for over two years thanked the team for hosting the Challenge:

This element of “light structure” suggests that schools can help children engage in the computational participation that characterizes these online collaborations. After a class of high school freshmen participated in the first Scratch Collab Challenge, Yasmin Kafai and her research team paired their analysis of online collaboration at the website with offline observations and interviews with the students themselves as they

Alice, Gamestar Mechanic , and Kodu include these types of communities and create open-source sites (in the style of communities like Linux) for youth to share, comment on, and contribute to their coded creations. Others (such as the nonprofit education initiative Globaloria) have created hybrids that connect game design activities in schools to large national networks that provide community and support for student participants, teachers, and administrators.

The new version of Scratch 2.0 continues this trend by including features that allow users to share data at multiple levels. Through a virtual backpack, users can copy others’ projects and store them for later use, and a Notes and Credits section helps fellow creators receive due credit when their work is repurposed. The 2.0 user profile pages are more customizable, and projects created through Scratch can be exported to social media sites.

Tools that facilitate particular mechanics of programming are not enough. A social context is needed where these programming tools can be used and where programming artifacts are shared. In a 2005 investigation of Seymour Papert’s samba schools, computer scientists José Zagal and Amy Bruckman analyze the characteristics of samba schools and highlight their flexibility to outsiders, the existence of a public event, and a plurality of members. The important message is that the success of the samba school relies not on the dance itself but on the social context in which the dance exists.

Youth-based cooperation is never a guarantee, but it is more likely to develop in the presence of openness, diversity, and a unifying event. And such cooperation matters because learning how to program collaboratively results in more authentic and peer-based learning. Grasping the key elements of computational thinking—including decomposing a complex task into a series of interrelated modules and coordinating control flow between different project components—develops better work habits

Remix

Remix, the process of creating something new from something old, follows the same pathway from the individual to the community that the previous chapter introduced. In the past, most programs had to be individually created “from scratch” to illustrate programming competencies, and code was understood to be a proprietary commodity that was built, refined, but certainly not shared. This approach set the tone for early computing coursework as children were introduced to the potential of programming in terms of input rather than output. Coursework focused on what children wrote as code rather than on what children actually produced with such code. The ability to build something “from scratch” or “from the ground up” under the “Language First” approach was the marker of a qualified programmer. Yet this focus on individual input also had its pedagogical limitations. Akin to learning about writing fiction in a creative arts course by being taught the meaning of nouns, verbs, and modifiers, such computing pedagogy stressed text-based functionality over wider considerations, such as what the assembled text offered in terms of a discernible product.

Remix has extended beyond music. In the field of computer programming, remix has a rich, if less widely known precedent. Within the technology industry, supervisors often develop the skills of novice programmers by having them tinker and build on existent pieces of code, which acquaints them with the language and gives them the opportunity to generate designs more complex than what they could accomplish solely on their own.

Remixing has a significant presence on Scratch. According to a recent analysis of the projects uploaded to the site, over a quarter (27.64 percent or 670,932) of all projects at the website are remixes of previous projects. Similar percentages of remixes have been reported on other youth-oriented programming sites, such as Kodu Game Lab and Studio Sketchpad.

To remix at Scratch is a simple process. When Scratchers open a project at the website and “look inside” at the underlying code, they are immediately presented with the option to remix via a button in the upper right-hand corner. When they click on the button, the project is reposted at the site as a remix.

Whenever an individual creates an account with Scratch, a crucial element of membership is agreeing to the open-source nature of the software, which is detailed in the Creative Commons Share-Alike license.8 In addition to being constructive and respectful online, users are reminded by the Scratch management team that they also must be open to sharing online. They are free to remix any other project that they find at the Scratch website just as they can develop

To address this lack of formal recognition, the Scratch team considered ways that attribution could be built into the site. Scratch researcher Andrés Monroy-Hernández added an automated attribution feature to the site that produced remix visualizations. This automated attribution allows users to track the development and repurposing of projects, which are now commonly referred to as “Scratch remix trees.” Branching out on the screen like a family tree, these automated visualizations can be accessed with the click of a button, displaying all of the remixes of any single project (and whether the project itself is a remix) (figure 5.1).

Despite this lack of depth in terms of content and coding complexity, the project-based socializations that are seen with these remixes are inherently productive. Connecting through a remixable Scratch project involves more personal commitment and creativity than simply connecting via Facebook or Pinterest because sharing on Scratch—unlike these other two sites—relies on exchanging self-generated content.

Documenting the various ways that Scratch users utilize remix as a pathway, educational researcher Karen Brennan notes that users often stumble onto remix as a way to learn.

As is evident with Katie and Nadia’s case, remix serves as the key practice for facilitating successful collaboration at Scratch and underpins the wider “community of practice”13 in which all members agree to make their own work downloadable for the sake of increased productivity across the site.

The project “How to Scroll,” which was posted by Scratch user “cougers,” is a good example of a project that exemplifies as it also explains. Scrolling is an essential element of console video games such as Super Mario Brothers and Pitfall. A moving background “scrolls” forward with the movement of the characters. Because scrolling is one of the most sought-after skills for Scratchers who are interested in making games, it leads the list of tutorials posted at the site.

Through these various how-to tutorials, Scratch novices have the ability to create complex games, stories, and art projects in a relatively short amount of time—certainly far shorter than developing the project entirely from the ground up. The key factor is that these forms of remix do not just repurpose the individual coding bricks but take projects wholesale and combine them with each other to create entirely new projects. Within these “mega remixes,” users are faced with the challenge of ensuring that the code from one project is compatible

In their analysis of the social structures underpinning remix cultures, media scholars Giorgos Cheliotis and Jude Yew point to the significant role that is played by competitions in drawing new users to websites and in retaining interest and spurring motivation (and productivity) among experienced members.18 This was our experience with the series of Scratch-based collaborative challenges sponsored at the website that are discussed in chapter 4.19 Now entering into their fourth year, these collaborative initiatives start with a “seed project,” which is a skeleton of a project and offers a basic framework (like a digital story or interactive art project) that entrants can use to remix in their respective teams. Remix sparks the collaborative activity

In their analysis of the social structures underpinning remix cultures, media scholars Giorgos Cheliotis and Jude Yew point to the significant role that is played by competitions in drawing new users to websites and in retaining interest and spurring motivation (and productivity) among experienced members.18 This was our experience with the series of Scratch-based collaborative challenges sponsored at the website that are discussed in chapter 4.19 Now entering into their fourth year, these collaborative initiatives start with a “seed project,” which is a skeleton of a project and offers a basic framework (like a digital story or interactive art project) that entrants can use to remix in their respective teams. Remix sparks the collaborative activity

First, competing participants created with and for each other to produce games and stories that are personally meaningful to them. Second, these youth collaborated with their peers, acknowledging that what they did together could not be done as well alone. Third, they utilized remix as a means to revise and improve on their own work and the work of others.

First, in schools students typically do not produce their own content but summarize what others give them. Even when they produce their own work, they do so for their teacher and rarely for their peers. Second, even when classes entail collaboration, research has shown that group work is ineffective when a small minority of the group consistently takes on the majority of the responsibility while others do very little.21 Accordingly, many students are disdainful of collaboration while others are too eager for it. Third, in schools, remix is not remix but more often considered outright plagiarism and is largely discouraged if not banned during the school day.

Such resistance comes from teachers, administrators, and students, who are sensitive about having their work appropriated by others—particularly without their explicit permission. In a 2010 study of how users react to having their projects remixed at the Scratch site, roughly a fifth left positive comments on their remixer’s profile page, and a fifth accused the remixer of plagiarism. Participants reported that although the Remix Tree visualization helped demonstrate attribution, this alone did not curb such feelings of resentment because it was the computer rather than the actual individual giving attribution.24 Sometimes the chance that work can be remixed at the Scratch site can be a hindrance rather than a help in encouraging youth to upload their work.

But even explaining remix as a compliment does not always assuage children’s resistance. In “‘No, I Don’t Feel Complimented’: A Young Artist’s Take on Copyright,” digital media researcher Dan Perkel describes his encounter with Sharon, a fifteen-year-old aspiring photographer who placed photographs online and discovered that they were copied onto several other websites. When asked if she considered such copy-and-paste appropriation to be a compliment, Sharon replied that she saw it as an intrusion upon her own work: “No, I don’t feel complimented.”

Although remixing on a basic level requires just a few mouse clicks to copy programs (and thus contributes little to computational thinking), selective remixing can require a high degree of sophistication and engage beginning designers in computational participation. Some remixing activities (such as considering what to modify in selected code segments, what to keep, and where to add or delete procedures or variables within a program) require a deep, functional understanding of the code, and in some instances, this type of remixing may be more complex than starting with a blank slate. Schools need to undertake and embrace the role of mediator. This can happen in two ways.

On a political level, copyright in the digital domain (in code and interfaces) presents complicated issues that are being defined in light of new cultural practices.26 For many youth, copyright is a complex issue to understand. The remixing dilemma—the difficulty of promoting both originality and generativity in projects—suggests that remixing can deviate into being used as a crutch rather than as a spur for imaginative productivity. Yet addressing this question of remix as crutch or spur is a crucial question for twenty-first-century classrooms and can serve as an opportunity for examining copyright issues and addressing the social implications of computational participation,

legal scholar Eric Perrott recommends implementing copyright education in all U.S. schools through the National Governors Association, and the Center for Social Media has posted online a series of best practices for teaching fair use in K–12 classes. These are admirable steps that focus on policies that inform K–12 curricula, but they avoid the question of pedagogy. Although there is interest in teaching children about the changing nature of what it means to create and re-create in the twenty-first century, schools lack meaningful practices for such lessons. Lecturing beside a white board is unlikely to help students understand what qualifies as fair use and copyright infringement—especially at the elementary

Second, schools need to examine their own tendencies to operate in a top-down manner and give more credence to bottom-up approaches to learning. Educational theorists such as John Dewey and Ivan Illich have advanced theories about how national learning initiatives