Gender, Feedback, and Learners' Decisions to Share Their Creative Computing Projects

Although informal online learning communities are made possible by users’ decisions to share their creations, participation by females and other marginalized groups remains stubbornly low in technical communities. Using descriptive statistics and a unique dataset of shared and unshared projects from over 1.1 million users of Scratch—a collaborative programming community for young people—we show that while girls share less initially, this trend flips among experienced users. Using Bayesian regression analyses, we show that this relationship can largely be attributed to differences in the way boys and girls participate. We also find that while prior positive feedback is correlated with increased sharing among inexperienced users, this effect also reverses with experience or with the addition of controls. Our findings provide a description of the dynamics behind online learners’ decisions to share, open new research questions, and point to several lessons for system designers.