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There appears to be no shortage of new businesses looking to apply technology to education. An entire ecosystem has emerged in recent years to develop and promote the latest product or service for the classroom or district. But a major hurdle remains: the divide between what entrepreneurs build and educators need.

The ecosystem stimulating the “edupreneurial” activity ranges from startup instigators (Startup Weekend EDU) and startup showcases (LAUNCHedu, SIIA Innovation Incubator), to startup incubators (Y Combinator, Imagine K12) and startup investors.

But in many cases, enthusiastic edupreneurs are propelled from this starting ramp to run full speed, like Wile E. Coyote, into an oversized anvil — actual teachers. It doesn’t matter how good the concept, how cool the technology, or how pressing the need. There can be a fundamental disconnect between passion and reality.

And that can keep good ideas out of the classroom.

To dissect the disconnect, the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest recently brought together a group of insiders: traditional education company executive Randy Reina, senior vice president of digital product development at McGraw-Hill Education’s Center for Digital Innovation; a not-so-recently-startup edtech company CEO Jessie Woolley-Wilson, who’s chair and president of DreamBox Learning; and teacher/entrepreneur Lindsey Own, a Seattle-area middle school science and health teacher and co-organizer of Startup Weekend Seattle EDU.

A handful of key themes emerged, casting light not just on what entrepreneurs need to know, but on issues parents and educators should expect as ed-tech startups get more attention.

TECH ALONE WON’T IMPROVE EDUCATION.

The biggest misconception that entrepreneurs (and even parents) have about the role of technology in education today, said DreamBox Learning CEO Jessie Woolley-Wilson, is that, “you can overlay technology on whatever is happening in education and you will see improvement.” The reality, Woolley-Wilson noted, is much more complicated. “Technology can help scale greatness” like a good teacher or teaching practices, but “the underbelly is that it can help scale bad things, too.”

But technology isn’t necessarily needed to “improve” education, said Own, a middle-school teacher, regarding her earlier experience in Chicago with project-based learning. “We didn’t need a computer (for every student) to do that,” though it would have made it easier. “We’ve had education reform for a very long time without technology.”

That’s something entrepreneurs — and parents — should consider when blindly pushing for technology in the classroom. Avoiding, as Woolley-Wilson calls it, too much “exuberance for technology for technology’s sake.”

TIME — NOT COMPETING PRODUCTS — ARE ENTREPRENEURS’ BIGGEST CHALLENGE.

Teachers are busy. But startups tend to forget that.

From implementing Common Core State Standards to preparing for high-stakes tests, educators have their hands full. Entrepreneurs, Woolley-Wilson said, might look at competition as products and funding, “but they often underestimate the competition for time. Teachers just don’t have that much time. So the solutions have to be easy to implement. They have to make the teacher feel inspired, rather than stupid.”

McGraw-Hill’s Reina agreed, pointing out that “when entrepreneurs come in with a great new idea they don’t necessarily think about the ripple effect the idea may or may not have with the rest of

[RELATED: The Rise of Educator-Entrepreneurs, Classroom Experience to EdTech]

the organization. Education is a complicated system and, in many ways, it’s a political system.” With a nod to author Malcolm Gladwell, Reina said, “We are at a tipping point — but that tipping point is going to tip slowly.”

Even with that caution, Woolley-Wilson noted there are a lot of innovative teachers willing to look at new things. But choose the moment carefully. “They’re focused on shelter and food, and you want them to talk about self-actualization.”

THE BEST PRODUCTS INVOLVE TEACHERS AND FIT WITHIN THEIR PRACTICE.

Another area of disconnect: A clear understanding of how a product will actually be used. “You can come up with a sweet widget. It might be great,” Own said, “but it really has to be rooted in what is going to be happening in the classroom. In the pedagogy. In the learning objectives.”

That problem tends to surface when entrepreneurs wait too long to get teacher input and feedback. And beta, Own said, is too late: “There need to be teachers involved from day one.”

Finding those teachers, though, is another matter. Reina, Woolley-Wilson and Own suggested contacting foundations that work with teachers, attending small, local education conferences, and soliciting help on Twitter and from LinkedIn’s ed-tech groups. Once startups make a connection, Own predicted, “Teachers will tell you all day long what they need.”

RISK IS A BIG OBSTACLE.

Startups fail. Startups “pivot” (the current euphemism for abandoning a product or a business model that isn’t working). Both are anathema to education institutions which may trust student data — and a student’s education — to consistent, reliable use of a product or service.

Then there’s the core matter of trusting that an entrepreneur’s educational solution will work.

Some support for entrepreneurs facing a skeptical school on the last point may come from a surprising source: foundations. Woolley-Wilson says she’s very hopeful about their role with educators: “What I think foundations can do is generate data that will help ‘de-risk’ a decision to try something new.”

Reina agreed, pointing out foundations have done a lot of good work on, for example, using games in learning. Having that kind of support, “changes the conversation with both educators and parents.” It’s a kind of research-based heavy lifting that foundations can do — which others can later review — that most startups cannot do for themselves.

[RELATED: What the Heck is a Teacherpreneur?]

Another way to reduce the risk of seeing if a product actually works is to adopt a “freemium” pricing model, in which some or all of the product can be used without charge. “The teachers need the opportunity to see it, to try it out and see if it’s worthwhile,” Own said.

There are other areas of disconnect, from entrepreneur assumptions that all districts — or schools in a district — have the same access to computers and Internet bandwidth (Own: “There’s no safe assumption (of what) even 50% of schools have”) to teacher expectations that good tech products will be completely free, forever (Reina: “You need to be able to get funding coming back to the people who are building the products so they can reinvest in the product”).

But overall, there’s hope the gap can be closed if K-12 educators and technology entrepreneurs listen to each other, often and early, and realize theirs is a symbiotic relationship. “The teacher is there to inspire kids and to help kids work together,” Reina said. “And do a lot of the things technology can’t do.”

Frank Catalano is a consultant, author and veteran analyst of digital education and consumer technologies. He tweets @FrankCatalano, consults as Intrinsic Strategy, and writes a column for GeekWire. He moderated this MIT Enterprise Forum session, co-authored a companion paper, and really likes it when edtech proponents and teachers just get along.

As the current generation of college graduates wrangles with an unprecedented amount of debt, a sea change is underway in higher education. More and more elite universities are offering free online courses that might characterize the next iteration of the college experience for the forthcoming generation of students.

Will students be able to receive the equivalent of a bachelors degree for free? How will brick-and-mortar institutions be used in the future? Will academic rigor suffer? How will credentials or tuition apply to those who come to campus and those who complete courses online?

At the moment, students of these online courses receive certificates of completion, but no university credit. But the movement is still in major flux as we speak, as day by day, yet another development in free online education is announced. What started 11 years ago with MIT’s OpenCourseWare — the syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and event video lectures from more than 2,000 MIT courses — has amassed into an explosive movement that’s compelling venerable institutions to reconfigure their education platform to an online audience.

Last fall, a group of Stanford professors decided to offer a few courses online free of charge and were overwhelmed when hundreds of thousands of students signed up for their courses. That experiment has spawned the growth of similar endeavors. Here’s a guide to some of the newest free education sites and what they offer, with the big caveat that this will soon change, as more institutions come aboard.

• COURSERA. Coursera is an interactive online learning system that offers free courses from Princeton, Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan—Ann Arbor and University of Pennsylvania. Their courses span the range from humanities, to social science, computer science, business, biology, medicine and mathematics. Andrew Ng, one of the Stanford professors whose class drew an astounding 100,000 students, and his new business partner, Daphne Koller, announced that they received $16 million in investment capitol from two prominent Silicon Valley firms to launch the project. Students will have access to lectures, interactive elements like quiz questions interspersed throughout lectures to help students recall and retain information, and peer-grading for homework, essays and tests. They plan to use crowd-sourcing algorithms to help ensure accuracy in peer grading, a move that will also  help professors manage such large-scale classes. What’s more, Coursera’s partner institutions will use the online learning platform to enhance in-class teaching. Based on a Department of Education study that shows online learning can be as effective as classroom learning, the participating universities will offer a mixture of interactive and static learning to explore the best way for students to retain the information. CERTIFICATION: As with the popular Stanford courses, students will not get academic credit from the participating institutions, but will receive a certificate of completion from the professor.

• MITx –> edX. MIT took its OpenCourseWare platform to the next level with MITx, which offers full professor-taught courses online (not just class materials), but after just one course this spring (Circuits and Electronics), MITx entered an agreement with Harvard, and is now part of edX. The two universities will use the MITx platform to bring in a wider array of classes to the site. What’s key here is the software for the platform is open-source, so other universities can use it too. The more universities add content, the more compelling a choice edX becomes amidst the growing number of offerings. Both schools have invested heavily in the project — each gave $30 million to a non-profit organization that they will co-manage. Edx will feature video lectures, embedded quizzes, interactive learning, online labs, and a lot of peer interaction. CERTIFICATION: Certificates of mastery will be given to students who demonstrate knowledge of course material.

• UDACITY. Sebastian Thrun, one of the professors who offered the first set of free online Stanford classes last year, which drew 160,000 registrants (22,000 finished the class), left a tenured position at the university to start Udacity, which focuses on computer science. Thrun taught an online artificial intelligence course for free at Stanford last fall with Dr. Peter Norvig, another artificial intelligence expert. Their course drew 160,000 students, with 22,000 students finishing the class. That inspired Thrun to start Udacity, which pulls in outside experts like Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, to teach courses. They do not operate under the auspices of a university, although some of their guest-lecturers do teach at other universities. Their course offerings are aimed at practical computer science skills, like how to build an app or search engine. CERTIFICATION: Students receive a certificate of completion at the end of the course signed by the instructor.

• UDEMY. Staying away from high-profile academic names, this site tagline is “the university of you.” Courses can be taught by anyone, and most are free, though some cost a small fee ranging between $5-$250. Whether or how much to charge is up to the instructor. The course offerings on Udemy are broad; they’ve got non-traditional courses like “Tournament Poker Theory” (cost $39) or “Yoga For Weight Loss” (cost $39), in addition to traditional academic subjects like computer science, business, and marketing. The site encourages anyone to become an instructor and build name or brand recognition.
• P2PU. Similar to Udemy, Peer-2-Peer University uses the open education model to allow users to learn from others on the web or design and teach courses. Course offerings are broad, but there is some attempt to categorize by offering “schools” of web development, mathematics, social innovation, and education. The courses are totally free and P2PU gives out badges in recognition of completion. Again, the model requires a significant amount of participation and collaboration from students, including grading each others’ assignments.
• MINERVA PROJECT. Billing it as the “first elite American University to be launched in a century,” Minerva CEO Ben Nelson, who was formerly CEO of Snapfish, intends to launch a full-fledged, “Ivy League-quality” online university by 2014. Rather than offering separate courses, the university will offer a complete college education with an accompanying degree. The cost is yet undetermined, though Nelson has said it will cost significantly less than most college degrees cost today. The Minerva Project has drawn attention from investors and is trying to draw the best professors possible by giving out Minerva Prizes to the best college-level teachers that come with a cash reward.

Flickr: Incase

By Nathan Maton

Back in 2001, MIT launched OpenCourseWare, a bold idea to put world-class MIT professors’ lectures, syllabi and resources online to the world for free. Today, Open Education Resources (OER) industry leaders are arguing that the free content is only the starting point.

The next stage of the open education movement has evolved into Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) — the key word being “massive,” as in drawing tens or hundreds of thousands of students. Last fall, Sebastian Thrun’s Artificial Intelligence course enrolled 160,000 students and Thrun recently gave up tenure at Stanford to start Udacity, a company that will offer more MOOCs.

But at such a huge scale, what are the digital methods of teaching that work best? Philipp Schmidt, founder of the free online university P2PU, preaches three building blocks: community, recognition and content.

“It was totally clear to me [several years ago] that content is only the starting point,” Schmidt said at recently at a SXSW session. “The really exciting stuff is going to be the learning, the assessments and the stuff that you need the content for. In a way, we started P2PU because institutions weren’t doing it. How do we build community around it and recognition for this open content is my question.”

The Stanford professors readily admit that some of the students who participated in their online courses provided their peers with deeper, more comprehensive answers than they were able to.

You’d expect MIT to tout its content as the solution. But that’s not how Steve Carson, director of external affairs for OpenCourseWare, describes the benefits of their project.

“The most exciting thing is that the last six months of open education have been spectacularly disruptive,” Carson says. “It was kind of a sleepy enterprise for the last 10 years where MIT was doing its thing and there were other projects doing their thing. It was all good and there were positive global benefits, but in the past 10 years I’ve heard people say campus-based education better look out, that this will be threatening to their business model, and I’ve never really felt that until the last six months. The pace of change in open education is qualitatively different than it was even a few months ago.”

Carson argues that MIT’s work is merely a necessary transitory experiment. It only puts classes and course material online, but you still have to watch, frequently from the back of the room, as the professor lectures students. He compares it to Wikipedia. MIT’s videos and materials provide deep references on a subject — but not the actual courses themselves.

Carson is a big fan of Schmidt’s work.  At P2PU, they run online courses that can be taught by a peer (you can create your own course), and they heavily promote the social part of learning. They have a peer mentor program to help students get through their courses and have the most users teaching web development courses, although Schmidt says they’ll be doing less of that. Schmidt believes that even with all the OER in the world, the way people learn is by being excited about it, by making things (even if it is just a blog post) and working together.

“The things I care most about is collaborative skills, are you a good communicator, can you get stuff done?” Schmidt says. “I think that’s the number one thing that isn’t being assessed anywhere that is super important. That’s what you ask when someone wants a job from you: do they get stuff done.”

Carson likes Schmidt’s focus on community, recognition and content because he argues it is more important to discover successful learning techniques rather than merely sign up 100,000 students online. He sees promoting big-sized classes as a way to bring attention to the issue.

“I think one of the higher level struggles these MOOCs are injecting themselves into is to change the way higher education as it is practiced on campus,” Carson said. “It is an opportunity to show faculty members different ways the Internet can support learning.”

And what exactly is the problem all these groups are trying to solve? It’s the sudden acceleration of global higher education demand.

“If you look at the scope and scale of the educational need in the world we’re going to need all of our educational systems firing on all cylinders to come close to even meeting the educational demand emerging in the world,” Carson said. “You could offer a thousand courses enrolling a 100,000 students each and you would not even be scratching the surface of the need in India and China and other developing regions. So we need these educational techniques to solve this problem.”

It took 11 years to get from the launch of OpenCourseWare to the point where a Stanford professor would walk away from a tenure position to launch another online learning venture. So how long will it take to build this next phase? For computer science, experiments like Thrun’s suggest that it may not take that long. Other types of courses Schmidt describes as important don’t yet exist.  And P2PU is still a relatively small community of around 30,000 members. Other countries have small experiments building OER and digital courses using high tech solutions like 3-D simulations, but no strong business model to scale their open efforts.

“We probably haven’t fully made the transition to digitally native pedagogies and learning approaches,” Carson said. “The first generation of distance learning is basically an attempt to move the classroom online, and I think that part of the scalable learning of these massive courses is the breakdown of that model.”

Flickr: AngryJulieMonday

By Heather Chaplin

Since MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten group released Scratch in 2007, kids ages 8 to 13 have built more than 2.2 million animations, games, music, videos and stories using the kid-friendly programming language.

Scratch allows kids to snap together graphical blocks of instructions, like Lego bricks, to control sprites—the movable objects that perform actions. Sprites can dance, sing, run and talk.

Now, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, Lifelong Kindergarten is collaborating with Tufts University’s DevTech Research Group to make Scratch Jr, a new version aimed at kids in preschool to second grade. The expected launch date is summer 2012.

The new project raises questions about childhood development and digital learning, and just how early kids should be introduced to computers.

Mitch Resnick, director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group, spearheaded the creation of Scratch. Having worked with a network of afterschool programs using digital media, Resnick was struck by the lack of software that enabled kids to go beyond playing with other people’s media. There was nothing that encouraged them to make their own interactive stories and games.

“What’s most important to me is that young children start to develop a relationship with the computer where they feel they’re in control,” Resnick said. “We don’t want kids to see the computer as something where they just browse and click. We want them to see digital technologies as something they can use to express themselves.”

There’s been a lot of buzz in the last few years about what it means to be literate in the 21st century. To Resnick, teaching kids to program was like teaching children of another generation how to write.

“At one point, there was a growing realization that people needed to learn how to write as well as read,” Resnick said. “They needed to be able to express themselves as well as understand how other people expressed themselves. Now it’s the same with new media. It’s not enough to be able to interact with new technologies; you have to be able to create with new technologies.”

The problem, though, is that programming languages like Java and C++ are difficult to learn. Resnick and his team imagined a language that would be more “tinkerable,“ as he calls it—more accessible. They also wanted the language to encourage kids to create work that was “personally meaningful,” as opposed to simply manipulating numbers. Lastly, they wanted the program to have a social component so kids could share their work and learn from one another.

While Resnick was building Scratch, Marina Bers, a graduate student at MIT’s Media Lab, was focusing on younger children, building, among other things, a programming language for robotics aimed at preschool-aged children. Bers would leave MIT for a position at Tufts University, but she and Resnick stayed in touch. In 2010, they decided to partner to develop the Scratch version for a younger audience. Scratch Jr officially kicked off this last summer.

According to Bers, the challenge is creating an interface that very young children can understand. Some of the problems are straightforward, like the fact that Scratch relies on text, and the youngest children cannot yet read.

“I’ve noticed materials online for games aimed at kids pre-K to third grade where there’s this assumption that children are fluent with reading when they’re not,” said Lisa Guernsey, director of the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation. “This then becomes an exercise in frustration.”

Bers hopes to solve this problem by replacing the text of Scratch with voice-over instructions.

In focus groups with teachers and children, the Scratch Jr research team has also noticed that younger children struggle with the number of blocks needed to create a program. “The relationship between cause and effect needs to be clearer for this age group,” Bers said. The idea is to reorganize the program so kids can focus on only one thing at a time.

Younger children also have trouble distinguishing between the colors in Scratch, (Scratch Jr will be redone in bright, primary colors), and they struggle with how Scratch moves from top to bottom (Scratch Jr will move from side to side.)

The group has also been studying tutorials in videogames, which teach kids how to play without realizing they’re being taught. “We want to add something like that to Scratch Jr,” Bers said.

For children ages 3 to 8, social interaction is perhaps the most important part of the learning process. That interaction can be with a teacher, a parent, an older sibling or a neighbor, said Guernsey of The New America Foundation, but young children must be able to study the facial expressions and other reactions of this “social partner.”

“The child needs to feel that what they’re learning is important to this other person,” Guernsey said. “Then it will go into the part of the child’s brain stamped ‘important.’”

When learning moves online, this becomes an issue.

“It can be the most wonderful content in the world,” Guernsey said. “But if it’s just slid into their lives without a social partner, then a lot of learning will be lost.”

The challenge isn’t lost on Bers. “We want to promote social interaction,” she said. “The question is, how do we imbed teacher interaction into Scratch Jr?”

Bers thinks of a playground. A good playground will have swing sets and slides for the kids, as well as benches and tables and chairs for the parents. The designers of Scratch Jr are figuring out how to embed the digital equivalent of those tables and chairs.

There are many who blanch at the idea of putting such young children in front of a computer screen. Concern over “screen time” is nothing knew—it began with television. But, according to Ellen Wartella, a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, these issues are far more nuanced than most people allow. First of all, she said, there simply isn’t good long-term research to show that being in front of a screen affects children negatively now, or in the future.

“There is no evidence of harm, although there are a lot of complaints,” she said.

Wartella isn’t saying screen time is good for children at a young age. Rather, she’s saying there isn’t good evidence yet to say it’s bad. There are no high-quality long-term studies that show that too much screen time as a 3-year-old will have direct consequences when he or she is 4 or 14. And in past research on TV screen time, it’s hard to untangle the effects of other influences, like parents and income.

One mistake people make, Wartella said, is focusing on the fact of the screen itself rather than the content of what the screen is showing. “Is it bad for kids to Skype with Grandma? I don’t think anyone would say that.”

Both Wartell and Guernsey refer to “the three Cs,” when considering these issues: content, context and the child. The question isn’t whether it is inherently good or bad when a preschooler is given a videogame. Rather, the questions should be contextual: Is the child playing with a social partner or on her own? What is the educational value of the game? And what are the needs of the particular child?

“When people worry about screen time, it’s the substitution effect they’re really worried about,” Guernsey said. “What happens when a kid is so enraptured by screen activity that they won’t go outside to play in other ways? But screen time being harmful by itself, there’s no evidence of that.”

For Bers and Resnick, it comes back to preparing children to be literate—in all the ways literacy is perceived today. For real empowerment in a world flooded with digital media, people need to understand not only how to interact with it, but how to make media themselves. Teaching children as young as 5 how to program not only teaches important executive functioning skills, which is crucial for that age group, but also helps demystify the computer, Bers said.

“Computers for most people are black boxes,” she said. “I believe kids should understand objects are ‘smart’ not because they’re just smart, but because someone programmed them to be smart.

“Also,” she said, echoing Resnick, “it’s about expression. In our times, we need kids to be able to express ideas in different ways, and learning to work in Scratch, in a computational medium, will give them another way of expressing themselves.”

The post originally appeared on Spotlight for Digital Media & Learning.

Flickr:wwworks

Could it be that the best way to learn happens in kindergarten? It’s an intriguing proposition, one that’s being explored at M.I.T. by folks like Mitch Resnick, the creator of the famous computer programming site for beginners called Scratch.

Resnick brought up the idea last week at the New York Times’ School for Tomorrow summit, and proclaimed that “schools should be on the edge of chaos,” a comment that lit up the Twitterverse.

Resnick is one of three recipients, including Robert Beichner, a physics professor at North Carolina State University, and Julie Young, president of Florida Virtual School, of the McGraw Prize in
Education. The three of them worked on a paper that exemplifies how technology should work seamlessly with learning.

Here’s Resnick’s excerpt from the paper, which in turn excerpts parts of A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown.

By Mitch Resnick:

At the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology our goal is to design technologies that empower people to explore, experiment, and express themselves in new ways. My Lifelong Kindergarten group develops tools that engage people in creative learning experiences, emphasizing the type of interest-driven, collaborative activities that traditionally exist in kindergarten.

We are inspired by the way kindergarten students learn through a spiraling process in which they imagine what they want to do, create a project based on their ideas, play with their creations, share their ideas and creations with others, and reflect on their experiences – all of which leads them to imagine new ideas and new projects. This iterative learning process is ideal preparation for today’s fast-changing society in which people must continually come up with innovative solutions to unexpected situations in their lives.

We work to develop new technologies that, in the spirit of the blocks and finger paint of kindergarten, expand the range of what people can design, create, and learn – thus sowing the seeds for a more creative society. Our goal is to help children learn to think creatively, reason systematically, work collaboratively, and learn continuously – essential skills for success in the 21st century. We are developing a new generation of technologies that not only enable children to connect with new concepts and ideas but also enable them to connect with other people, providing new pathways for sharing, collaborating, and empathizing with one another.

Examples from two of my projects – Scratch and the Computer Clubhouse – illustrate this point.
Scratch is a graphical programming environment that makes it easy for children ages eight and up to create their own interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations – and then share their creations with one another online. Roughly one million children have joined the Scratch online community, where they share more than 2,000 new Scratch projects each day.

The way students use this online community provides a compelling example of how valuable human connections can be fostered by new digital tools. Participants in the Scratch community serve alternately as peers and teachers, solving problems and perfecting programs together. The following excerpt from A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, a recent book by Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown, describes the experiences of nine-year-old Sam, who uses Scratch to create his own animations and games:

Scratch has an additional element that takes the experience to a different level: a collective, a community of similarly minded people who helped Sam learn and meet the very particular set of needs that he had. When Sam posted his game online to that community, it became accessible to thousands of other kids who were also working with Scratch, and that’s when some very interesting things started to happen. The other players were able not only to play Sam’s game, but also, with the click of a button, to download it into the Scratch interface, see the code, and modify it if they wished.

Perhaps the most important aspect of all, however, was the users’ ability to comment on projects they liked by clicking a “Love it?” button. What Sam found when he joined the online community was that he was no longer simply creating animations or games; he was part of a larger conversation. He was excited about receiving his first comment, of course. But when we asked Sam what it meant to be a good member of the Scratch community, we were surprised by his answer. It had nothing to do with building games or posting animations. Instead, Sam told us that the single most important thing was to “not be mean” in your comments and to make sure that you commented on something good when you came across it, as well. The game does not just teach programming; it cultivated citizenship…

Sam made perhaps the most revealing comment, one that tells us the most about the new culture of learning, when we asked him what he looks for in other people’s programs. He told us, “something really cool that you could never know yourself.” While playing Scratch, Sam has learned a lot about programming and a lot about participating in online communities. But what he has learned most of all is how to learn from others.

The following example illustrates how a 13-year-old girl, identified as “BalaBethany,” learned to program through interactions with peers online:

BalaBethany enjoys drawing anime characters. So when she started using Scratch, it was natural for her to program animated stories featuring these characters. She began sharing her projects on the Scratch Web site, and other members of the community responded positively, posting glowing comments under her projects (such as “Awesome!” and “OMG I LUV IT!!!!!!”), along with questions about how she achieved certain visual effects (such as “How do you make a sprite look see-through?”). Encouraged, BalaBethany then created and shared new Scratch projects on a regular basis, like episodes in a TV series.

She periodically added new characters to her series and at one point asked why not involve the whole Scratch community in the process? She created and uploaded a new Scratch project that announced a “contest,” asking other community members to design a sister for one of her characters. The project listed a set of requirements for the new character, including “Must have red or blue hair, please choose” and “Has to have either cat or ram horns, or a combo of both.”
The project received more than 100 comments. One was from a community member who wanted to enter the contest but said she didn’t know how to draw anime characters. So BalaBethany produced another Scratch project, a step-by step tutorial, demonstrating a 13-step process for drawing and coloring anime characters.

Over the course of a year, BalaBethany programmed and shared more than 200 Scratch projects, covering a range of project types (stories, contests, tutorials, and more). Her programming and artistic skills progressed, and her projects clearly resonated with the Scratch community, receiving more than 12,000 comments.

Our group at MIT also founded the Computer Clubhouse project, an international network of 100 after-school centers where low-income youth ages 10-18 learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. With support from adult mentors, participants create interactive stories, music videos, and robotic constructions. The following excerpt underscores how technology can help children forge their identities and establish themselves as part of a community:

Consider Mike Lee, who spent time at the original Computer Clubhouse in Boston. Mike first came to the Clubhouse after he had dropped out of high school. His true passion was drawing. He filled up notebook after notebook with sketches of cartoon characters. At the Clubhouse, Mike developed a new method for his artwork. First, he would draw black-and-white sketches by hand. Then, he would scan the sketches into the computer and use the computer to color them in. His work often involved comic-book images of himself and his friends.

Over time, Mike learned to use more advanced computer techniques in his artwork. Everyone in the Clubhouse was impressed with Mike’s creations, and other youth began to come to him for advice. Some members explicitly mimicked Mike’s artistic style. Before long, a collection of “Mike Lee style” artwork filled the bulletin boards of the Clubhouse. “It’s kind of flattering,” said Mike.

For the first time in Mike’s life, other people were looking up to him. He began to feel a new sense of responsibility. He decided to stop using guns in his artwork, feeling that it was a bad influence on the younger Clubhouse members. “My own personal artwork is more hard core, about street violence. I had a close friend who was shot and died,” Mike explained. “But I don’t want to bring that here. I have an extra responsibility. Kids don’t understand about guns; they think it’s cool. They see a fight, it’s natural they want to go see it. They don’t understand. They’re just kids.”

Mike began working with others at the Clubhouse on collaborative projects. Together, they created an Online Art Gallery on the Web. Once a week, they met with a local artist who agreed to be a mentor for the project. After a year, their online art show was accepted as an exhibition at Siggraph, the world’s premiere computer-graphics conference.

As Mike worked with others at the Clubhouse, he began to experiment with new artistic techniques. He added more computer effects, and he began working on digital collages combining photographs and graphics, while still maintaining his distinctive style. Over time, Mike explored how he might use his artwork as a form of social commentary and political expression.

As he worked at the Clubhouse, Mike Lee clearly learned a lot about computers and about graphic design. But he also began to develop his own ideas about teaching and learning. “At the Clubhouse, I was free to do what I wanted, learn what I wanted,” said Mike. “Whatever I did was just for me. If I had taken computer courses [in school], there would have been all those assignments. Here I could be totally creative.” Mike remembers – and appreciates – how the Clubhouse staff members treated him when he first started at the Clubhouse. They asked him to design the sign for the entrance to the Clubhouse, and looked to him as a resource. They never thought of him as a “high-school dropout” but as an artist.

After several years of volunteer work at the Clubhouse, Mike earned his high- school equivalency diploma, then landed a job as a graphic designer at a high- tech company near Boston, designing graphics for the company’s web pages, stationery, catalogs, and brochures.

Mike’s experiences at the Computer Clubhouse illustrate the power of human interaction and digital learning to support and encourage a learner who felt alienated by his traditional school experience. With access to the technology and social support at the Computer Clubhouse, Mike learned how to develop his artistic skills, to share his expertise with others, and to become an active and productive member of his community.

Scratch

Click on the image to play this game designed by a student at a Los Altos elementary school.

By Sheena Vaidyanathan

“I think I fixed it, can I upload my program?”
“Can you test my app?”
“I just need to add a help menu.”

These are not remarks at a Silicon Valley technology startup, but from an animated conversation in a classroom of 10- and 11-year-olds in the Los Altos School District in California. These fifth- and sixth graders are experiencing the excitement of computer programming through Scratch, a tool designed by MIT. They are creating their very first fully functional program.

As part of a district-wide program called Digital Design that I teach, every student from fourth through sixth grade is exposed to computer programming in addition to 2D and 3D design. The first assignment this trimester was to create a drawing program – a computer version of the popular Etch-A-Sketch toy. Students learned some fundamental programming concepts, then wrote their own programs. The project was deliberately open ended and the creative results surprised me.

Most of these students have never programmed before, and certainly did not think of themselves as computer experts. But in less than two hours (three classes), they created programs with help menus, keyboard shortcuts, menus to change colors, brushes, paper and more. Imagine what they could do with a little more time and experience!

Drawing Programs Samples

The second project was to create a simple video game, and it was constructed in five classes. Students learned programming concepts such as iteration, conditionals, and variables in the context of game design. As before, the the students showcased their originality.

Here’s an example: Use arrow keys to collect bananas without touching the dino.

Learn more about this project

Simple games

About 900 students have learned programming through Scratch in the last 2 years via the Los Altos School District’s Digital Design program. The examples shown are just a small sample taken from the last trimester. More Scratch projects can be found on the Digital Gallery on this website.

What is particularly remarkable about these projects is that every student in the public school district takes this class. The projects are not just made by students who are already predisposed to computers – the “wanna-be computer geeks.” One student told me right at the beginning that she does not like computers. The class also includes English language learners who just transferred to the school district. There are also several special education students who are mainstreamed for this program. This is a case of everyone learning programming in school, not the select few who know that they want to and can afford to take an expensive computer camp.

These students may not choose to be computer scientists, but they have learned computational thinking, an important digital-age skill. (See more on computational thinking on the ISTE website). They will be able to use these skills to solve problems in a wide range of fields in the future. There has been much written about the need to go beyond teaching the use of computer programs and to actually teach how to make computer programs. Douglas Rushkoff makes a good case for learning programming in his book Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age: “When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them. ”

The most exciting part for a computer scientist and Silicon Valley resident like myself is that some of these kids are now passionate about programming. They are working on Scratch projects during recess and at home (Scratch is a free download from MIT).

Eventually, one of these kids may go on to create the next Hewlett Packard, or the next Apple or the next Google. I like to think that the future of Silicon Valley is in good hands; this new generation of creative computer programmers will keep our innovative spirit alive.

This article was posted on Digital Art for All by Sheena Vaidyanathan, who teaches 3D design and computer programming to students in the Los Altos School District in California.

Watch Rushkoff’s video about the importance of learning to program:

http://youtu.be/kgicuytCkoY