Surveys, collaborative art and virtual currencies: Children programming with online data

Being able to store and access data online enables a wide range of creative possibilities, starting from surveys to collaborative art, from global high-score-lists for games to real-time chat-rooms, from multiplayer games to virtual economies with real participants. While end-user tools in these categories are readily available to children, what is still missing is the opportunity for children to create such systems. Causes behind this lack of opportunity include, among other things, high barriers to entry due to complex and often inaccessible client-server technologies, as well as hard to understand topics such as access control, etc. This paper presents Cloud data-structures-a feature in the online visual language Scratch 2.0 that enables children to programmatically store and retrieve data online. While standard data-structures are stored in memory, for Cloud variants, all operations (and data) are additionally sent to remote servers over the Internet. This has two consequences for a Scratch 2.0 project: (1) Cloud data-structures are persistent across multiple execution instances, and (2) they are shared between simultaneous instances. This paper describes the motivations behind, and the design of the Cloud data-structure system, along with a study of how children are using it in diverse and creative ways.