How “Wide Walls” Can Increase Engagement: Evidence From a Natural Experiment in Scratch

A core aim for designing constructionist learning systems and toolkits is enabling “wide walls”—a metaphor used to describe supporting a diverse range of creative outcomes. Ensuring that a broad design space is afforded to learners by a toolkit is a common approach to achieving wide walls. We use econometric methods to provide an empirical test of the wide walls theory through a natural experiment in the Scratch online community. We estimate the causal effect of a policy change that gave a large number of Scratch users access to a more powerful version of Scratch data structures, effectively widening the walls for learners. We show that access to and use of these more powerful new data structures caused learners to use data structures more frequently. Our findings provide support for the theory that wide walls can increase engagement and learning.