Shruti Dhariwal. Scratch Memories: A Visualization Tool for Children to Celebrate and Reflect on Their Creative Trajectories. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC '18), Trondheim, Norway. June 2018

Abstract

This paper introduces Scratch Memories — a new data-driven web-based system that empowers children to celebrate and reflect on their creative journey with Scratch, an online community for programming and sharing interactive projects. The system dynamically generates personalized visualizations in the form of a video, highlighting a user’s key moments, diverse creations, and collaborative experiences in the community. Existing tools for visualizing children’s progress in computational learning are primarily designed for educators, and often focus exclusively on evaluating specific concepts in individual projects. The goal of Scratch Memories is to present a new approach towards designing positive reflective experiences that value the full range of children’s contributions as members of a creative community. I highlight the key design principles and iterative development process. Based on semi-structured interviews with 14 children ages 10-18 years, and observations from testing the system at two public events, I describe how Scratch Memories not only sparked children to reflect on their personal trajectories, but also to express motivation towards increasing their participation.