Learning Scratch @ MIT with Mitch Resnick

Tuesday, July 15th brought us an incredible opportunity to visit the Lifelong Kindergarten @ MIT and learn Scratch from Mitch Resnick! Scratch is a program that was created to allow students to create interactive stories, games, animations and share these creations via the Web. One of the key components of LLK's philosphy is that kids spend too much time interacting and not building or designing. Mitch explained the conundrum; how can we let kids build things they want to create and still learn the things they need to? He went on to discuss the four or five different ways one can introduce Scratch to kids (depending on learning styles) and then proceeded to systematically let us experience each of those ways. The creativity required and inherent problem-solving necessary for using Scratch means that it would be a terrific fit with kids in the classroom. I have no doubt they would eat it up. And according to Marc Prensky, we really ought to be spend more time teaching programming.

Anyway, the Scratch Web site was launched just over one year ago and since then 150,000 projects have been uploaded. Projects are now uploaded roughly every two minutes.

Two new features the Scratch team has been developing include Scratch Clubs and Scratch Ed for teachers. Scratch Clubs will have a more strict set of rules about what is appropriate as deemed by Scratch Club leaders. You can also sub-search by your own scratch club (a club can be an entire grade level, a single classroom, district, etc.) Scratch Ed will be a forum for teachers to share / download exemplary units and uses. See the example Barb and I created below.