My friend Warren Buckleitner will have a piece in the Circuits section of the New York Times tomorrow that does some raving about Scratch, the new Mitch Resnick offering from MIT. He spent about five minutes starting to show me what a constructivist cool tool this could be for my own kids, and now I’m chomping to let them have at it. Mind you, I have no programming brain, so I’m hoping to learn as well. Maybe my kids can teach me in a few days… Also, via Stephen Downes, this video which does some scratching too.
I love what Resnick says at the end:
“Our ultimate goal is to bring together a worldwide community of creators who are constantly using Scratch to create new projects, share them with their friends around the world and learn from one another in the process.”
Very cool. Mix ups and mash ups and programming for kids, creating global networks and collaborations, teaching one another. How little does that sound like school?
Here’s hoping I can get my kids started…
Technorati Tags: scratch, constructivism, technology, learning, programming
I’ve taken a look at Scratch and while I admit that it is pretty cool, I have sadly concluded that it is to programming what MacDonald’s is to a home cooked meal. It looks nice, it is interactive, and to be fair, it can be used to create some sophisticated programs. But it does tend to reward a shotgun approach to thinking rather than ordered disciplined thought. While perhaps boring and pedantic that is what makes for successful programming.
I’m glad to see that Scratch is receiving such publicity since Scratch IS Logo. There are many of us who have been committed to keeping programming, and Papert’s vision for Logo as a “mathland” and constructive environment with “no threshold and no ceiling” alive for years (25 in my case). ISTE killed off our journal, “The Logo Exchange,” several years ago after a more than 20 year run.
Resnick’s ideas do not fall from the sky. They stand on the shoulders of 40 years worth of thinking about the richest ways in which to use computers as intellectual laboratories and vehicles for self-expression. Papert, Cynthia Solomon, Alan Kay, Brian Harvey, Hal Abelson, Dan Watt, Andy diSessa, Paul Goldenberg, Idit Harel and countless teachers from here around the world have contributed a great deal of knowledge to the world of ideas that make Scratch possible.
Scratch, built on Squeak, and similar to MicroWorlds is a good thing, especially since so many in the Web 2.0 community are excited by it. Welcome to the party. Long before blogging, thousands of progressive educators from around the world used logo as a way to connect and represent our educational dreams for children. Physical Logo conferences were well-attended and one of the first educational online conferences was about Logo in the mid-1980s.
I still recommend that everyone read Papert’s book, “The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer.” It will help you situate Scratch.
Here are some sites that may be of interest:
http://www.papert.org (Lots of articles by Seymour Papert)
http://www.stager.org/logo.html
http://www.microworlds.com/company/philosophy.pdf (What is Logo and Who Needs It? by Seymour Papert)
http://www.microworlds.com (The site for the best, most appropriate similar environment for use in classrooms)
David,
Would you care to explain why one style of programming (particularly one that is boring and pedantic) is superior to children having no agency whatsoever over the computer?
There is currently close to zero programming in American education, with the exception of the unfortunate AP CS course. Is that state-of-affairs preferable to kids creating “sophisticated programs” they care about?
Incidentally, I believed that the arguments over top-down and bottom-up or “spaghetti code” vs. organized programs were long over. Research by Thyberg, Papert and others has demonstrated that programming structure and debugging strategies is much more closely related to learning style and mirror the writing process.
Order and efficiency come from a desire to make a program clearer, smaller and faster. This comes from expereience and a need for efficiency. Teaching one pedantic style denies for diverse problem solving strategies (one of the reasons programming belongs in the educational process) and was a lot more important when
I know that orderly code makes it easier for others to extend it, especially in an open-source sense, but kids are perfectly capable of documenting even clumsy programs. The vocational goals of programming represent but a fraction of the rationale for children learning to program.
Will, Thanks for this link. My girlfriend’s kids are home today because it’s a Jewish holiday and they go to a parochial school. I already called her ten year old and told him to download the program. I completely agree with Gary. If kids are going to ever learn sophisticated programming it’s important that they start somewhere. My girlfriend’s son is working on fractions in math, he’s not yet ready to work on calculus iterations which is required in some programming. But, I bet by the time I get to his house later today he can show me how to use Scratch.
Idit Harel’s late 80s research on constructionism and Logo demonstrated that elementary age children asked to design software in Logo to “teach” younger children about fractions learned a great deal more about fraction, plus programming and a number of affective skills as well. The children in that experimental group ran circles around the control groups that were taught Logo programming formally and fractions, as well as the control group that was taught fractions in a traditional fashion.
Her book, Children Designers: Interdisciplinary Constructions for Learning and Knowing Mathematics in a Computer-Rich School , was honored by the American Educational Research Association as book of the year in the early 90s.
(I am waiting for my longer post, full of links, to appear. Will has to approve link-filled posts.)
Will,
Thanks so much for posting this. We were just having a conversation at lunch today about how we could get my 3rd graders a taste of scripting, and here it is! I love it when that happens. I will be showing it to them tomorrow!