Social learning theory posits that learning is most effective when providing learners with opportunities to observe and interact with peers. Unfortunately, current K-12 programming education overemphasizes individual learning and discourages learners from observing and interacting with others. The Scratch online community provides youth opportunities to actively participate in the community by allowing them to observe and interact with others. However, it is unclear what motivates learners’ active participation in the Scratch online community. With a large-scale database with more than two hundred thousand Scratch projects, this study explored the impact of the computational thinking reflected in Scratch projects on users’ participation. We examined Scratch’s online users’ computational thinking profile via clustering analysis on the projects they created, then studied the influence of computational thinking level reflected in projects on the users’ participation through causal analysis. The clustering analysis revealed three clusters of learners, and the advanced learners did not create more projects than others but their projects attract more participation from peers. Our statistic analysis finds a low to moderate strength of correlation between the computational thinking level reflected in projects and their popularity. However, the further causal analysis suggests that the computational thinking level reflected in projects fails to causally affect learners’ participation. Our results suggest that instructors should not only attach importance to the development of basic CT skills of youth but also do well to find ways to get youth to participate actively in social interaction activity during the programming process.

社会学习理论认为，当为学习者提供观察和与同伴互动的机会时，学习是最有效的。不幸的是，当前的 K-12 编程教育过分强调个人学习，不鼓励学习者观察他人并与他人互动。Scratch 在线社区为青少年提供了积极参与社区的机会，让他们能够观察他人并与他人互动。然而，目前尚不清楚是什么促使学习者积极参与 Scratch 在线社区。本研究通过拥有超过 20 万个 Scratch 项目的大型数据库，探讨了 Scratch 项目所体现的计算思维对用户参与度的影响。我们通过对Scratch在线用户创建的项目进行聚类分析来考察他们的计算思维概况，然后通过因果分析研究项目反映的计算思维水平对用户参与的影响。聚类分析揭示了三个学习者集群，高级学习者没有创建比其他人更多的项目，但他们的项目吸引了更多的同龄人参与。我们的统计分析发现项目中反映的计算思维水平与其受欢迎程度之间存在低到中等强度的相关性。然而，进一步的因果分析表明，项目中反映的计算思维水平未能对学习者的参与产生因果影响。