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.

Paul Schultz

What kids learn at a young age will determine whether they're prepared for a future full of unknowns.

When most of us were deciding what to major in at college, the word Google was not a verb. It wasn’t anywhere close to being conceived at all. Neither was Wikipedia or the iPhone or YouTube. We made decisions about our future employment based on what we knew existed at the time. We would become educators, journalists, lawyers, marketing reps, engineers.

Fast forward a couple of decades (or more) and we see that the career landscape has changed so drastically that jobs need new definitions. Social media strategist, app developer, mobile web engineer?

Some of us could ask ourselves if we would have embarked upon our current careers had we predicted how the Internet would revolutionize every part of our lives? It’s hard to say, but when it comes to preparing our kids for what’s ahead, Cathy Davidson has a few ideas. The author of Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking), who’s also a professor at Duke University, believes that, in light of the fact that “65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet,” we should cast aside our fear of technology, and prepare our school-aged kids with important skills, both in technical ways and other less tangible ways.

“We are right on time to give up techno-phobia and to tackle the problems and opportunities of the digital world with good sense, pragmatics, realism, and purpose,” Davidson said. “Once we absorb the realization that we’ve already changed, and that we’re actually doing pretty well despite major realignments in our lives, then we can think about how we want to take this amazing new tool [the Internet] and use it in a way that better serves our lives. It’s time to survey our lives and figure out what works, what doesn’t, and how we can make real and practical improvements in our schools, our workplace, our every day lives.”

Davidson offers three can-do suggestions for parents:

1. EXPERIMENT WITH SCRATCH. It’s a brilliant and fun multimedia programming language that allows inventive media mixing almost immediately, without any background. It is creative and fun. Even if your child has no interest in being a programmer when they grow up, familiarity with the building blocks of a programming language will give them some skills and expertise at producing the kind of content they are already consuming. [See "5 Tools to Introduce Programming to Kids."]
2. EMBARK ON A MEANINGFUL PROJECT.Help your child (at any age, really) by being willing to help out—but emphatically not to lead or rescue—in an extended, risky project that has real impact in the child’s community—school, neighborhood, church, synagogue, community center. But stay out of the way. Let the kids shape the project. Kids should find a project that will probably not succeed in all the ways they hope. Dreaming big, taking risks, and scaling back if and when you have to are fantastic skills. These skills are hardly ever taught in the school room which seems to be organized (as is much American society these days) as if some litigious personal injury lawyer is there ready to pounce at any moment.
3. LEARN HOW TO BE A RESPONSIBLE DIGITAL CITIZEN. Learn how to give and take feedback in a public and responsible way. There are different software tools that can help you set up a system where each student has an online identity, for privacy. Give each student 10 stars to award over the course of, let’s say, a 10-week project. Each week, every student is required to award one star to a member of the team whom s/he deems to have done the most to move the project forward. Before students award their stars, they need to put in writing, on the class website, the reasons for the choice. They shouldn’t waste good energy on negative criticism. Critique is the easy way out, as anyone who has read the trollish comments on the Internet knows. Negative comments are a drain on everyone’s energy and negativity is not the same as high standards. If each star is awarded with a well thought out assessment of why merit has been earned, that is a far better way to train judgment than trashing.  What special contribution did a classmate make that made you want to give him or her a star? Everyone will learn from the answer (and the accumulating stars). Sound easy? It’s not. But if you can learn judgment–not silly bubble test grading, not sarcasm or bullying but clear-eyed judgment on the way to the group’s success at attaining its goals—then you are building up a repertoire of successful skills and methods that you can call upon later, in any circumstance.

Davidson believes the culture of fear that has dominated the public discussion around the Internet and kids is damaging at best, ruinous at worst.

“Sadly, it’s a fearful time in American culture, with news focusing excessively on everything tragic, horrifying, and threatening in the world,” she said. “There is no evidence of an increase in such crime, just an increase in reporting.”

And the notion that the Internet is ruining our brain, our attention and memory is flase, she says. “Everything new changes our habits, makes new patterns, and there is certainly a learning curve whenever we face new challenges. But the fact is we’re doing amazingly well. Let’s have some perspective here!” she says.

Davidson also believes the archaic education system — especially when it comes to graded exams — will inevitably change because it has to. The discrepancy between how kids learn inside the formal school environment — complete with bell schedules and drills — and the free-form and social nature of informal learning will invariably have to be addressed.

In my interview with Davidson, I ask her to enumerate practical steps schools can take to prepare students for the future, and what she considers to be the ideal school day.

Here’s the full transcript of my interview with Davidson. I recommend reading it — and Davidson’s book — in full. It’s well worth the time.

Q. It seems that so much of the apprehension about bringing technology into schools is about fear. Fear of losing control of information, fear of harming children’s attention spans, their learning brain. How do you think we can address or overcome these fears?

A. Sadly, it’s a fearful time in American culture, with news focusing excessively on everything tragic, horrifying, and threatening in the world, especially sexual crimes against children. There is no evidence of an increase in such crime, just an increase in reporting. And an exponential increase, for middle-class American parents, in limiting our children’s mobility. We know from research that a child’s world has shrunk in the last 200 years in the West from being allowed, as preteens, to wander to the next village or to roam over one’s city until now, where even “play” has to be monitored by an adult-arranged and supervised “play date.”

We are also fearful about ourselves—the Internet is ruining our brain, our attention, our memory. Well, it isn’t. Everything new changes our habits, makes new patterns, and there is certainly a learning curve whenever we face new challenges. But the fact is we’re doing amazingly well. Let’s have some perspective here!

Historian Robert Darnton says there have been four great Information Ages in all human history, where a new technology has transformed how we communicate and interact—and he goes back to 4000 BC Mesopotamia for the first of these, the invention of writing. Then comes movable type, then mass steam-powered printing of the Industrial Age that makes books available to the masses for the first time in history, and now, our own Information Age where anyone can “Broadcast Yourself.”  We’re 15 years into something so paradigm-changing that we have not yet adjusted our institutions of learning, work, social life, and economic life to account for the massive change. Fifteen years in is when people tend to start thinking about technological change in less fearful and more practical ways. They give up their nostalgia for the “before” and then start to focus on now, on how we can make the tools and resources available to them as productive as possible.

In other words, we are right on time to give up techno-phobia and to tackle the problems and opportunities of the digital world with good sense, pragmatics, realism, and purpose. Once we absorb the realization that we’ve already changed, and that we’re actually doing pretty well despite major realignments in our lives, then we can think about how we want to take this amazing new tool and use it in a way that better serves our lives. Being afraid is never useful. It’s time to survey our lives and figure out what works, what doesn’t, and how we can make real and practical improvements in our schools, our workplace, our every day lives.

Q. What do you predict could happen if the education system continues to resist the change?

A. I predict the education system will change. It has to. There were enormous changes to all forms of education in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In fact, most of what we think of as “school” was developed and institutionalized about 120 years ago to teach kids regulation and efficiency, the bywords of industrialization. Farm kids and immigrant kids were streaming into the cities. To make an industrial labor force required the school bell (in literal and metaphoric terms) and lots of regimentation.

We have a mismatch between the inventive ways kids learn at home online and in their game play and with their friends on social networks and the industrial age structure, division of subject matter, and ways of assessment in school. It will change—because everyone (parents, teachers, kids, principals, policy makers) know our schools are out of date. I think we are on the verge of seeing a major change in educational policy and in how we test (the first step—get rid of those End of Grade exams!), how we measure, and how we teach and learn.  It will happen because it has to.

Q. What do you think that ideal school day could look like?

A. Remember Ichabod Crane, that parody of the tiresome schoolmaster in Washington Irving’s story “The Legend of Sleep Hollow” (published in 1820). If you plunked him down in a contemporary school room, he wouldn’t have a clue what electricity was, he’d be baffled by computers, but he would know exactly where to stand and he’d know exactly where he stood: front of the class, in charge, teaching to the test!

Cathy Davidson

In my ideal school, there would be no one school day because every day would be different. And it wouldn’t be a school of the future: the future is now! In researching Now You See It:  How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, I spent time with incredible teachers who, in ways large and small, inspire their students to learn. My future school would bring them together, take lessons from them. They give us heart and will because they already exist. We can learn from these three, one who taught decades ago in a rural one room school house, one senior scholar-teacher in a Manhattan school, one brand-new twenty-four year old teacher in a small urban city (in Durham, N.C.).

• From Inez Davidson: Mrs. Davidson is a “back to the future” teacher whose Friday “challenge days” can be incorporated into any school today, right now. She taught back in the 1950s to 1980s, in a three-room school house in rural Mountain View, Alberta, Canada. She turned teaching third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders into an asset instead of a deficit, having kids teach one another what they had learned the year before. And every Friday, the third- and fourth-grade kids would be pitted against the fifth graders in a learning challenge that the kids themselves would dream up—spelling bees, math quizzes, geography tests, language tests, grammar tests, poetry and rhyming competitions. Or project challenge: Who can build the highest tower out of Popsicle sticks without glue? And then she set year-long challenges as well. My personal favorite was challenging the kids to find pen pals in as many Mountain Views as they could find anywhere in the world, researching the places where they lived, becoming pen pals, and then interviewing the pen pals for a final research paper on Mountain Views in China or New Zealand.  Decades before the Internet, she made learning connect kids around the world, expanding horizons, teaching geography and languages and politics and history in a way that mattered intensely to the kids.
• From Katie Salen: I would take the idea of the Boss Level Challenge, a building block of the game mechanics that power Quest2Learn, a public school in Manhattan. Katie Salen is a professor at Parsons School of Design who was part of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative that I’ve also been working with for several years, helping to run the annual Digital Media and Learning Competitions. Katie proposed working with the New York city school board, with teachers and parents, to create a revolutionary school within all the existing rules. Q2L works with the teachers’ unions, with the city’s lottery system of accepting pupils, with end-of-great testing, with college prep aspirations, with all of the supposed restrictions that limit teachers everywhere. I couldn’t believe she would succeed, but Katie is a gamer and she met the challenge.  Q2L exists and she’s now working in Chicago to start similar schools. The specific assignment that I loved at Q2L took kids who had spent a semester building new levels for the popular digital learning game LittleBigPlanet (LBP) and challenged them to rebuild their video game level in the real world. They switched off the screens and had to calculate and plan, with blueprints and research and  scissors and glue, paper and wood and paint.  Brilliant!  Kids need to understand the relays back and forth between real and virtual worlds and need the skills to navigate both.
• From Duncan Germain: Duncan was a 24-year old first-year teacher when I spent time in his sixth grade class at Voyager Academy, a public charter school in Durham, North Carolina, where I live. He taught something called Creative Productions which was intended to take all the things kids were learning in other classes and give them real world application. I was there for the bridge building challenge where students self-organized into groups ranging in size from one (some kids preferred to work alone) to five. I talk about all the really remarkable skills his students were learning on the way to build the best model bridge but what most impressed me was the long sheet about collaboration that each student had to fill out, describing such things as how to “justify” the project they were doing and their methods relative to their other school studies, the habits of mind the project was instilling, and the relationship of the project to the real world.  Sounds tough? They were doing it. When I asked Mr. Germain where he got the idea, he said from his father. These sixth graders were using a project-plan form that his father used as a management consultant helping businesses adjust to new global, distributed economies of work and labor.

These are just three examples. I think it’s important for all of us to know that future school already exists, it is working. These great teachers and others I profile in Now You See It inspired me and I hope they inspire other out there too.

Q. If you could suggest five practical applications to apply to every school in the country, what would they be?

1. End standardized EOG tests–they demotivate learning and good teaching.  Instead test in challenging ways, using tough game mechanics with real-time feedback on results so kids can learn from the test—not be taught to scam the test!
2. Make all learning real, relevant, tied to communities, with real application in the kids’ lives outside of the classroom. Example: Ban research papers—unless they are published online and have an informative, persuasive, or other real purpose for others. Learning should have an impact beyond getting an “A” on  the assignment.
3. Teach kids to think through, with, about, for–and create–new, interactive digital global communication. I don’t mean this as an add on. I mean rethinking all the subjects we now teach in view of the possibilities (what techies call “affordances”) of the digital age. That means getting rid of the “two cultures” binary. STEM subjects are impoverished without creativity, analysis, critical thinking. The Information Age is about putting back together the knowledge that the Industrial Age subdivided. A simpler way is to say have them all learn Scratch multimedia programming and think about the possibilities.
4. Restore arts, music, shop, P.E., dance:  Kids need the soul-stirring learning that lets them move, make, sing, create, dream.
5. Eliminate the “college prep” and AP distinctions, and stop making college the implicit standard for all education, back to preschool. Many worthy careers don’t need higher ed.   Many careers that don’t need higher ed still need a liberal arts education in creative, applied, cross-disciplinary thinking, all of which are as necessary to run your whole hair salon or motorcycle repair shop as they are to get a law degree. Conversely, make college free and open to everyone, at any age. Now, that would be a game changer!

For those unfamiliar with Scratch, some background: Developed by the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is a visual programming language for children age 6 and up. Scratch is available free of charge, and the software runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux computers. (Scratch 2.0, which is currently under development, will bring the tool into the Web browser as opposed to being a download.)

TEACHING ABOUT PROGRAMMING

Scratch requires no programming knowledge, and as it’s aimed at a young audience, its interface is, by necessity, fairly intuitive. With Scratch, users choose from a selection of blocks that govern motion, color, and sensors, for example and use these to built scripts. These scripts are what makes the program’s objects (sprites) perform actions. These building blocks of the Scratch programming language all fit together — quite literally — making it easy for users to drag and drop the necessary pieces into their program.

TEACHING ABOUT CREATIVE COMMONS, REMIXING & SHARING

Since its release in 2007, over 850,000 users have joined the Scratch website and have shared, as noted above, almost 2 million projects — from games to animations. That sharing aspect has become a fundamental part of the Scratch community. The projects that are uploaded to the site are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License. That means that other users can download the graphics and the source code from these projects and are free to reuse and remix elements from them.

That sharing has led to some interesting responses from users, as Andrés Monroy-Hernández, MIT PhD Candidate and founder of Scratch’s online community, has documented in his research (PDF). Monroy-Hernández tracked the responses to remixes from the originators of projects, and he found a wide range of reactions: people were just as likely to leave positive comments on remixes as they were to accuse these remixes of plagiarism.

One solution to this, while maintaining the openly licensed element of Scratch projects, would be to have a technological solution whereby the computer program automatically included some sort of attribution when a project was downloaded and remixed. But according to Monroy-Hernández’s research, members of the Scratch community seemed to respond more positively when that credit wasn’t automated but was manually given — whether it appeared in the form of credits within a program or, more likely, as part of the description of the project on the site. Indeed, in some of the follow-up interviews that were conducted, it was this act of manually crediting that made the difference in many users’ minds between a project that was a remix and a project that was plagiarism.

“Our fundamental insight is that while both attribution and credit may be important, they are distinct concepts and that credit is, socially, worth more. A system can attribute the work of a user but credit, which is seen as much more important by users and which has a greater effect on user behavior, cannot be done automatically. Computers can attribute. Crediting, however, takes a human.”

The lessons gleaned from the Scratch community are applicable to other communities as well — to classroom projects as well as to other social media sites. Scratch offers young people an opportunity to “imagine, program, share” as its slogan suggests. Often when we talk about Scratch, it’s that middle piece — the programming — that’s the focus. But there are clearly other benefits to participating in the Scratch community — understanding what it means to build upon others’ work and what it means to give credit to others when you do so.

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

Instructables

Continuing our summer slide series, in which we’ve offered ideas on how to keep learners’ math and literacy skills sharpened, we now turn our focus to science and tech-related ideas. The summer months provide a great opportunity for students to work on projects that help extend some of the ideas they might have learned during the school year or to pursue ideas that they might not have had a chance to do in the classroom.

Here is just a short list of projects that could help prevent the summer slide in science and technology.

1. BECOME A CITIZEN SCIENTIST

Citizen science takes scientific inquiry and research out of the lab (and out of the sole purview of scientists and researchers) and puts it in the hand of those without formal scientific training — “citizens,” volunteers, and, yes, students. There are a number of ways that students can engage in citizen science projects over the summer, whether they’re spotting animals or identifying plants. Here are a few suggested apps and websites.

2. LEARN TO PROGRAM

Despite the explosion of the number of tech jobs, very few students actually have an opportunity to learn programming at the K-12 level. Programming remains a project that many students do outside the classroom, hacking on their home computers. There are a number of tools that can help even very young children learn how to program, including Scratch and Kodu. Here are a list of a few programming languages that make a good place for budding computer scientist to start.

3. BUILD A ROBOT

Summer vacation is only two or three months long, so the suggestion to build a robot might seem ambitious. But in addition to the new tools that make it easier for kids to learn how to build software, you can find tools that make it easier for them to learn how to build hardware — things like LEGO Mindstorms and Arduino. But even without any programming or electrical engineering skills, building a robot can be as easy as following step-by-side instructions from Instructables or assembling do-it-yourself kits like these Blinky Bugs.

What summer science and tech projects are on your To Do list?