The programmers’ collective: fostering participatory culture by making music videos in a high school Scratch coding workshop.

We highlight ways to support interest-driven creation of digital media in Scratch, a visual-based programming language and community, within a high school programming workshop. We describe a collaborative approach, the programmers’ collective, that builds on social models found in do-it-yourself and open source communities, but with scaffolding structures that support students’ learning. We analyze the work of a class of high school student collectives engaged in programming music videos as part of a collaborative challenge in the online Scratch community. Our multi-level analysis focused on students’ learning specific programming concepts, effects of collaborative and task design on learning, and their personal reflections on collaboration and media creation. We address how these overlapping collaborative experiences point to the value of “nested collectives,” or multiple levels of designed-for collaboration. We also highlight a needed shift from a focus on computation to computationalparticipation, highlighting the innately social aspects of media creation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]