Remixing between imitation and originality: Exploring creative behaviors in scratch projects

Remixing is a balance between imitation and originality, which gets a lot of attention as an important source of creative behaviors. Exploring the relationship between the Scratch project and its remix would provide a new perspective for understanding users’ creative behaviors. To this end, this study used 20 projects and their 957 remixes as samples to analyze creative behavior in Scratch through quantitative statistics and correlation analysis. Three research questions are addressed: (1) What creative levels are there among the remixes? (2) What relationships are there between the project and its remixes? and (3) What creative trends are there indicated in the remixes? The main results are concluded as follows. First, four creative levels of remixes based on the SOLO taxonomy are found, including feature change, appearance change, element creation, and structure creation. Feature change has the highest sum of remixes, which indicates that most remixes are at a low creative level. Second, the internal characteristics of projects are related to the lower creative level of remix, while the external characteristics are attached to the higher creative level of remix. Finally, the two-level, three-level, and four-level iteration chain of remixes are found, in which remixes with high creativity is more likely to inspire remixes with lower or equal creativity. Based on these results, suggestions for further research and improvement are discussed. This study has important implications for understanding the creative level of remix among users in programming community and guiding users to make valuable remixes.