Block-based programming has gained popularity in introducing the novice to programming concepts. Programming is perceived as being difficult and challenging because of its abstract nature.

This preliminary study set out to explore and gauge pre-service teachers’ experiences of programming and robotics. Hence, the training and development of pre-service teachers is crucial so that they can respond to the skills needed in the Digital Age. The emphasis on programming and robotics owing to the unfolding of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the African continent has led the South African National Department of Education to propose a new subject in Grades R to 9. Hence, despite the challenges, Scratch projects can be studied in the same way as social networks, which opens up new possibilities to improve our understanding of the behavior and motivation of novice programmers. The tone in the comments is mostly positive with catchy youth language. Our results nevertheless show that topics from pop and net culture in particular are present, and even recent societal events such as the Covid-19 pandemic or BLM are to some extent reflected in Scratch. It turns out that the diversity of topics within the Scratch projects make the analysis process challenging.

By analyzing titles and project comments in a dataset of 106.032 Scratch projects, we explore which topics are common in the Scratch community, whether socially relevant events are reflected and how how the sentiment in the comments is. The educational programming language Scratch is not only used for teaching programming concepts, but offers a platform for young programmers to express and share their creativity on any topics of relevance. In this paper we explore whether this type of analysis can also be used for introspection of the software world, by looking at the thriving scene of young Scratch programmers. Identifying relevant and trending societal matters is important, and often done using social network analysis for traditional social media channels such as twitter. Societal matters like the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement influence software engineering, as the recent debate on replacing certain discriminatory terms such as whitelist/blacklist has shown.

Warrior cats games on scratch