Online learning webs : designing support structures for online communities

Abstract

This thesis explores how we can design online learning communities to better support connections to the people and resources beginners need when learning to program. I describe and analyze the design and implementation of the Scripts Workshop, a learning environment that supports members of the Scratch online community who are stuck on a programming problem in a Scratch project. The Scripts Workshop considers the People, Activities and Spaces needed to support these users in getting un-stuck. I conclude by describing a set of design principles for building learning webs within online communities, derived from the Scripts Workshop experiment.