  Societal matters like the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement influence
software engineering, as the recent debate on replacing certain discriminatory
terms such as whitelist/blacklist has shown. Identifying relevant and trending
societal matters is important, and often done using social network analysis for
traditional social media channels such as twitter. In this paper we explore
whether this type of analysis can also be used for introspection of the
software world, by looking at the thriving scene of young Scratch programmers.
The educational programming language Scratch is not only used for teaching
programming concepts, but offers a platform for young programmers to express
and share their creativity on any topics of relevance. By analyzing titles and
project comments in a dataset of 106.032 Scratch projects, we explore which
topics are common in the Scratch community, whether socially relevant events
are reflected and how how the sentiment in the comments is. It turns out that
the diversity of topics within the Scratch projects make the analysis process
challenging. Our results nevertheless show that topics from pop and net culture
in particular are present, and even recent societal events such as the Covid-19
pandemic or BLM are to some extent reflected in Scratch. The tone in the
comments is mostly positive with catchy youth language. Hence, despite the
challenges, Scratch projects can be studied in the same way as social networks,
which opens up new possibilities to improve our understanding of the behavior
and motivation of novice programmers.
