Although socializing is a powerful driver of youth engagement online, platforms struggle to leverage engagement to promote learning. We seek to understand this dynamic using a multi-stage analysis of over 14,000 comments on Scratch, an online platform designed to support learning about programming. First, we inductively develop the concept of "participatory debugging" -- a practice through which users learn through collaborative technical troubleshooting. Second, we use a content analysis to establish how common the practice is on Scratch. Third, we conduct a qualitative analysis of user activity over time and identify three factors that serve as social antecedents of participatory debugging: (1) sustained community, (2) identifiable problems, and (3) what we call "topic porousness" to describe conversations that are able to span multiple topics. We integrate these findings in a theoretical framework that highlights a productive tension between the desire to promote learning and the interest-driven sub-communities that drive user engagement in many new media environments.

翻译：尽管社交是驱动青少年在线参与的重要动力，但平台往往难以将这种参与转化为学习机会。本研究通过对Scratch（一个旨在支持编程学习的在线平台）上超过14,000条评论进行多阶段分析，试图理解这一动态。首先，我们通过归纳法提出了"参与式调试"的概念——一种用户通过协作技术故障排除进行学习的实践。其次，我们通过内容分析确定了该实践在Scratch平台上的普遍程度。第三，我们对用户随时间变化的活动进行了质性分析，识别出作为参与式调试社会前因的三个因素：(1) 持续性社区，(2) 可识别的问题，以及(3) 我们称之为"话题渗透性"的现象——即对话能够跨越多个话题的特性。我们将这些发现整合到一个理论框架中，该框架揭示了在许多新媒体环境中，促进学习的愿望与驱动用户参与的兴趣导向子社区之间存在的建设性张力。