Quality of Scratch Projects

« Researching Scratch

1 reply [Last post]

ivete leite de oliveira

Member

February 08, 2011

Hi
in the ArTe (www.artentnu.com) project we have been using scratch for dissemination and research goals and we love it.

We have now started to look at scratch programs from a software engineering point of view trying to see if it is possible to define quality metrics for scratch programs.
See http://artentnu.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/how-can-we-assess-the-quality-of-scratch-projects/

At this stage I wonder if there exist a possibility, given a scratch program, to generate statistics about its code (like number of control statements, number of variables, number of sound pieces, etc.).

I also wonder if there are related attempts to define the quality of scratch programs. I am aware that quality is a relative attribute that must be defined according to a goal, but given 1.5 M scratch programs available it would be great if we had a way to select the best ones for teaching purposes, the best for visual aestetics, etc.

Regards,

Ivete

Replies

Karen Brennan

Member

March 05, 2011

Hi Ivete,

Sorry for not getting to this sooner!

There's a group at The College of New Jersey that you might be interested in. They have a project called "Scrape", which is one way of responding to your question about analyzing the content of Scratch projects.

I think that the project, which is in private beta at the moment, will be presented at SIGCSE next week.

But they have a video on YouTube that explains the thinking behind Scrape.

Thanks,
K