Mention computer programming and many intelligent and fairly computer-savvy college-bound youngsters and adults metaphorically throw up their hands, assuming it’s too hard and certainly way beyond them.
As a result, relatively few study programming in college, a reality that caused enough concern for Microsoft, Intel Foundation, Google,Iomega, and the MIT Media Lab research consortia, not to mention the National Science Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, to provide funding for efforts to turn that around.
The folks at the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab put their heads together to come up with ways to break down barriers holding students back from pursuing a future career in programming.
The result? Software called Scratch that makes programming fun and easy. Download and use is free.
Young people can remix and make their own video game, invite friends to play it, and those friends could, if they choose, remix that game by changing the icons, script, movements, and even music. Since its inception in 2007, Scratch has taken off.
“There are almost a million accounts and more than 2 million downloads of the Scratch software. It also comes pre-installed in some of the XO laptops [that are] part of the One Laptop Per Child program, so Scratch has reached a broad audience.”
Andrés Monroy-Hernández
Designed to encourage borrowing and transforming the work of others, not unlike the way rap and hip hop remix music – “scratching” and manipulating the sound on a turntable (the inspiration for the name of MIT’s program), Scratch offers users the opportunity to take an existing program uploaded by others in the Scratch community and alter it in novel and amusing ways. They can also add original art or other elements.
Check out MIT Media Lab’s overview of Scratch:
Scratch: overview from andresmh on Vimeo.
Andrés Monroy-Hernández, a postdoctoral researcher who was part of the research team headed up by Mitchel Resnick, created an international social media website called the Scratch Online Community, available in many languages. The site allows users from all over the world (mostly young people and educators) to upload and share, remix their own animations, video games, and interactive art projects.
Andrés Monroy-Hernández
Many kids work on their projects over the course of multiple sessions, it’s a common approach. I do not know if all the kids participating know there have been more than 2 million projects shared so far, but the number is displayed prominently on the front page, so I assume a lot of them – they notice it. They do have access to a lot of statistics information, we even developed a website to share those numbers (stats.scratch.mit.edu). I think we see the effect of this on kids’ pursuit for “fame” on Scratch, which is both a powerful driving force for participation and a problematic obsession.”
Andrés Monroy-Hernández
The community Monroy-Hernández created now has almost 1 million members, who have shared more than 2 million projects so far. His presentation on the process, during SXSWi, Designing a Creative Online Community for Kids, is one of those parents and educators of kids from K-12 should check out.
The story of the Scratch Online Community and how it came to be is one that Monroy-Hernández says offers lessons that are generalizable to many other efforts to combine creativity, learning, and social media. While Scratch is unique, he believes their failures and successes provide much that others can learn from.
The experiences of the developers of Scratch have already played an influential role in the development of other online communities such asKodux.com for users of Kodu, Microsoft’s game-programming software that allows young users of XBox 360 to create their own games and share them with others.
For this review, I downloaded Scratch and was able to figure out how to take an existing game, add figures or icons, and manipulate a script and tools in order to get my adaptations to take a series of actions. It was both intriguing and fun.
In fact, if I had not had other commitments, I would have gone back to see what else I could create. And that’s the point.
Students may get a first taste of using Scratch in school, but it is designed to attract users to come back again and again. In the process of playing, they are learning many of the basic elements of programming.
Users only see the fun, not all they are learning in the process.
