Build Stuff Summer Spain

Scratch is an amazingly popular programming language for kids, with 14 million public programs available in their online repository. But, what do kids do in their programs? Are their programs simple or complex? Do they apply programming concepts or do they just play with the blocks? Do kids develop good programming habits? Are there common code patterns?

To answer those questions, we scraped the Scratch repository, retrieved 250,000 projects and performed source code analysis on them.

In this talk, you will learn about:
Scratch programming, in case you want to teach your kids (or play yourself :))
Our methods for scraping and analyzing 250k programs
The answers to all research questions above, including whether kids make 'smelly' programs (spoiler alert: yes!)

We will also discuss the lessons learned and showcase some extreme cases we found in the Scratch repository.