How Well Do Online Forums Facilitate Discussion and Collaboration Among Novice Animation Programmers?

Animation programming is a widely-respected approach for helping students to learn programming skills, and online forums are a widely-used approach for helping students to interact with one another. But in what ways, if any, does combining animation programming with online forums lead to useful discussion and collaboration among learners? To answer this question, we analyzed online forum discussions among people who were learning to create animation programs using the Scratch programming environment. We discovered that specific kinds of online posts were more likely than others to be followed by discussion, and we found that the ensuing collaboration often involved the exchange of design ideas and feedback within small groups of users. These findings reveal opportunities for enhancing online forums and surrounding tools so they more effectively facilitate discussion, collaboration, and ultimately development of programming skills.