Scratching the Surface.

Lauren B — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 06:37:12 +0000

The MIT Media lab has developed a program turning ‘kids from media consumers into media producers’. Stephanie Schorow, in her article Creating from Scratch, purports that the Scratch software unleashes kids’ creativity online. Scratch enables students to make their own interactive stories, games, music and animation that can then be uploaded onto the web. While this seems a challenging task to be achieved by children, Scratch opens the gate for all to benefit, enabling students to create interactive stories and games that could previously only be achieved by computer programmers. This new software is simple to use; students place together graphical blocks to develop their creations and promotes that using this software doesn’t require the students to understand the jargon of traditional programming languages, including punctuation and syntax. Designed for kids aged 8 years and up, Scratch gets the students to think creatively and solve problems systematically which The MIT Media Lab believes are skills critical to success in the 21^st century. The biggest benefit this program provides is that the students’ creations can be shared with other kids within an online community, providing them inspiration and feedback to further develop their work. With input from children when developing Scratch, the MIT Media Lab have created a program with no limit to what students can achieve. The variety of stories and games reflect a diverse range of imaginations, catering to any topic which enables them to capture their thoughts and ideas, an aspect that I feel to be especially valuable to the construction process. Positive responses to the software by students and teachers are obvious when you explore the final products that have been submitted on the website. These examples are inspirational when you consider that the animations were created by children, so check out http://scratch.mit.edu/ .

Pencils, Paper and Podcasts. » animation

Scratching the Surface.