scratch.mit.edu
Presented by
John Maloney
and
Evelyn Eastmond
Workshop 1
(Teaching with Scratch): March 7, 10am-1pm
Workshop 2
(Scratch for Young People): March 7, 2-5pm
Lecture: March 8,
10:30-11:15am
"Hello World"
Workshop (Getting Started with Scratch): March 9,
10:30am-noon
Scratch is a new graphical-programming environment that
enables young people (ages 8 and up) to create their own
interactive stories, games, and animations - and share their
creations on the web. Scratch is designed to make programming more
tinkerable, more meaningful, and more social. Since Scratch was
launched in May 2007, more than 300,000 projects have been shared
on the
Scratch website, which
has been called "the YouTube of interactive media." As young people
create and share Scratch projects, they learn to think creatively,
reason systematically, and work collaboratively. Scratch is a
project of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab,
directed by the distinguished educational researcher, Mitchel
Resnick.
Scratch aims to broaden the audience for computer programming by
making programming:
- More tinkerable. To create programs in Scratch, you
simply snap graphical blocks together into stacks. The blocks are
designed to fit together only in ways that make syntactic sense, so
there are no syntax errors. Different data types have different
shapes, eliminating type mismatches. You can make changes to stacks
even as programs are running, so it is easy to experiment with new
ideas incrementally and iteratively.
- More meaningful. We designed Scratch to support a wide
range of different types of projects, so that people with diverse
backgrounds and interests can all work on personally-meaningful
projects. In particular, Scratch enables people to programmatically
control graphics, animations, music, and sound, extending the
media-manipulation activities that are popular in today's youth
culture.
- More social. Scratch makes it easy to share projects on
the web – and remix projects created by others. On the Scratch
website, members are constantly borrowing and building upon one
another's ideas, images, and programs. More than 15% of the
projects on the website are modified versions of other projects on
the site.