Visualizing remixes in an online programming community

Abstract

Scratch is a block-based programming language and associated online community that allows children and young adults to learn to build interactive games and animations - and share their creations with one another. Scratch's foremost goal is to inspire learning through exploration and creative thinking. A novel feature of its projects are their complete openness: a user can always open up another user's project to see all of its code and assets, and begin tinkering with them as if they were their own. This new revision branches from the original project, creating what we call a "remix" project. Recently, the authoring environment has been rebuilt as "Scratch 2.0", which brings what used to be a downloadable file completely online. The community website is now integral, and remixing is as easy as clicking a button. This thesis documents the rethinking and implementation of the remix tree, a visualization which allows users to explore the branching structure of changes by different users to a project over time. Additionally, we analyze changes in usage behavior and user feedback. The result is a much more usable and visually appealing tree which handles massive data sets fairly well, but continues to require iteration.