from consumer to producer.
Thursday evening the Learning Research & Development Center (LRDC) of the University of Pittsburgh kicked off the Distinguished Speaker Series in honor of it's 50th Anniversary. Their inaugural speaker was none other than Mitchel Resnick, a man of many titles including but not limited to, LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research and Director, Lifelong Kindergarten Group, MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Simply put, he's a genius. More specifically, as head of the development team, he is responsible for Scratch, a programming language and GUI interface that allows children to program their own video games, animations, and more.
I first learned about Scratch this past summer from students in my Legomation summer camp for 8 - 10 year olds. I had already been tossing around the idea of teaching kids programming, but I still had a lot of questions about which tools should be used. These kids made my decision abundantly clear. Most of them were from the same elementary school and had learned Scratch in the classroom. I spent snack breaks and lunch sitting out on the lawn working on creating a simple game using this technology. The objective? Make a monkey jump and collect bananas for points.
Normally during breaks students socialize with one another and play the usual school-yard games, but this time an overwhelming majority of them stayed huddled around me.
They spouted off suggestions:
Even more enlightening, they offered to help with my code. Countless times I hit a brick wall only to be shown the way by a fourth grader. Scratch was clearly the tool I had been searching for. Scratch isn't just easy to learn to use, it's easy to truly understand and allows for students to become teachers. For this age group, I also wanted to find a tool that teaches the concepts of programming without forcing students to learn a specific programming language. I wanted it to be a logical first stepping stone to a variety of programming languages.
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Scratch enables everyone to express themselves. To go from simply interacting with technology to designing and creating technology. I am constantly worrying that I am too much of a consumer instead of a producer, tools like Scratch insure that future generations will be the latter.
During his talk, Mitchel spoke of taking a "kindergarten approach" to learning and creating. This is the idea that creations should be the result of something we imagined, not the result of a pre-determined end goal. The idea of open-ended questions, with multiple right answers. He believes that this will result in more creative thinkers. People who don't just build, but think about the process, the challenges, and the solutions.
He introduced the "Creativity Spiral" which I found fascinating, because it follows the model we had already been working on in our lesson plans for Intro to Video Game Programming. We want the students to imagine a game, create it, play it (and play each others games), then reflect on how they could improve, and continue the process over again and again multiple times.
Once the students are given the basic knowledge of Scratch, we also plan to have them dissect preexisting Scratch games to figure out how they work with limited input from adults. Teaching them to not only think for themselves, but also allowing them to explore the possibility that there is more than one way to achieve the same end result.
Expressing - "I am a designer"
Connecting - "How can I collaborate with others?" "How will others use this game?"
Questioning - "How was this made?"
Scratch isn't just software, it also has a vibrant online community where creators can upload their projects, chat on forums, and find support. With Scratch there is no concept of mine and yours, every project is considered Creative Commons. Other users and remix and reuse your work. Of course some people will always balk at this, but the majority of users have used this to their advantage, creating a strong collaborative community.
Mitchel spoke of two users who really encapsulate this idea of community, MyRedNeptune and a student who created a sport science project, I didn't catch his handle, so I shall call him Ted.
Though I think of Scratch primarily as a programming tool for video games, many users enjoy it's drawing features. MyRedNeptune is one such user, she creates detailed characters, also known as sprites, and shares her creations online. She originally began creating sprites for herself, branched off into creating sprites for others as they asked, and now she has begun creating tutorials so users can learn how to create sprites themselves.
Ted (still not his real name) used Scratch for an entirely different purpose. He created a game which tested reaction time, then uploaded it to the Scratch website. He asked those who played his game to fill out a questionnaire which asked players if they played sports and if so, how many hours they played each week. Ted then collected that data from the internet and put it into a report. Where else could a kid find such an opportunity for crowd-sourcing data?
I don't think I learned much more than I already knew from Mitchel's talk, but I do feel encouraged knowing the lesson plans I am creating share the same teaching approach the creators of Scratch had in mind when the program was created and I can't wait to see what this new generation of geniuses has to offer!
I first learned about Scratch this past summer from students in my Legomation summer camp for 8 - 10 year olds. I had already been tossing around the idea of teaching kids programming, but I still had a lot of questions about which tools should be used. These kids made my decision abundantly clear. Most of them were from the same elementary school and had learned Scratch in the classroom. I spent snack breaks and lunch sitting out on the lawn working on creating a simple game using this technology. The objective? Make a monkey jump and collect bananas for points.
Normally during breaks students socialize with one another and play the usual school-yard games, but this time an overwhelming majority of them stayed huddled around me.
They spouted off suggestions:
- Why don't you make brown bananas that cost you points?
- Create a spider that crawls along the ground as an obstacle!
- What about a special banana that's worth two points!
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| Clicking the image redirects you to the Scratch website where you can play my game! |
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Scratch enables everyone to express themselves. To go from simply interacting with technology to designing and creating technology. I am constantly worrying that I am too much of a consumer instead of a producer, tools like Scratch insure that future generations will be the latter.
"{Scratch} Give kids the opportunity to be the designers."
During his talk, Mitchel spoke of taking a "kindergarten approach" to learning and creating. This is the idea that creations should be the result of something we imagined, not the result of a pre-determined end goal. The idea of open-ended questions, with multiple right answers. He believes that this will result in more creative thinkers. People who don't just build, but think about the process, the challenges, and the solutions.
He introduced the "Creativity Spiral" which I found fascinating, because it follows the model we had already been working on in our lesson plans for Intro to Video Game Programming. We want the students to imagine a game, create it, play it (and play each others games), then reflect on how they could improve, and continue the process over again and again multiple times.
Once the students are given the basic knowledge of Scratch, we also plan to have them dissect preexisting Scratch games to figure out how they work with limited input from adults. Teaching them to not only think for themselves, but also allowing them to explore the possibility that there is more than one way to achieve the same end result.
"The main goal is not learning to code, it's coding to learn."
Expressing - "I am a designer"
Connecting - "How can I collaborate with others?" "How will others use this game?"
Questioning - "How was this made?"
Scratch isn't just software, it also has a vibrant online community where creators can upload their projects, chat on forums, and find support. With Scratch there is no concept of mine and yours, every project is considered Creative Commons. Other users and remix and reuse your work. Of course some people will always balk at this, but the majority of users have used this to their advantage, creating a strong collaborative community.
Mitchel spoke of two users who really encapsulate this idea of community, MyRedNeptune and a student who created a sport science project, I didn't catch his handle, so I shall call him Ted.
Though I think of Scratch primarily as a programming tool for video games, many users enjoy it's drawing features. MyRedNeptune is one such user, she creates detailed characters, also known as sprites, and shares her creations online. She originally began creating sprites for herself, branched off into creating sprites for others as they asked, and now she has begun creating tutorials so users can learn how to create sprites themselves.
Ted (still not his real name) used Scratch for an entirely different purpose. He created a game which tested reaction time, then uploaded it to the Scratch website. He asked those who played his game to fill out a questionnaire which asked players if they played sports and if so, how many hours they played each week. Ted then collected that data from the internet and put it into a report. Where else could a kid find such an opportunity for crowd-sourcing data?
I don't think I learned much more than I already knew from Mitchel's talk, but I do feel encouraged knowing the lesson plans I am creating share the same teaching approach the creators of Scratch had in mind when the program was created and I can't wait to see what this new generation of geniuses has to offer!
"I love Scratch. Wait, let me rephrase that - Scratch is my life. I have made many projects. Now I have what I call a "programmers mind". That is where I think about how anything is programmed. This has gone from toasters, car electrical systems, and soooo much more." - 11 year old boy
