Emilia Gan

This research will examine how young people are processing issues relating to the Covid pandemic, as demonstrated by projects being created and shared on the Scratch programming platform.

Research presented at CSCW 2018

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.

Informatica Feminale is a summer program for women in computing held at Bremen University in Bremen, Germany.

Taught two 2-day workshops during 22nd session of Informatica Feminale (Summer, 2019):

• Data Programming with Python
• Bioinformatics with Python

Participated in the course: Game.Play.Design exploring Values in Games/Valuable Games
The final project for the class was to create a hybrid digital/physical game, which was then presented to the public at Dokk1, the public library in Aarhus. Our game, Create-A-Critter, aimed to engage children in a digital world created in Unity. Children were able to scan artwork they created and use it to customize the animals populating the world.