Karen Brennan

Making Projects, Making Friends: Online Community as Catalyst for Interactive Media Creation

To become full and active participants in todays technologically saturated society, young people need to become creators (and not just consumers) of interactive media. Developing the requisite abilities and capacities is not a wholly individual process; it is important for young people to have access to communities where they can collaborate and share ideas. This article uses the Scratch online community for exploring how different forms of participation and collaboration can support and shape the ways in which young people develop as creators of interactive media. We describe participation in this community in terms of a spectrum ranging from socializing to creating and present examples of three forms of collaboration within the community. We argue that the most exciting interactive media creation and valuable learning experiences are taking place in the middle space, where participants draw on the best of socializing and creating practices.

Imagining, Creating, Playing, Sharing, Reflecting: How Online Community Supports Young People as Designers of Interactive Media

As young people design interactive media, they go through an iterative process of imagining, creating, playing, sharing, and reflecting. In this chapter, we describe how this iterative design process is ideally supported by having access to other people. We illustrate this through case studies of young people using the Scratch programming environment to create their own interactive media with support from the Scratch online community.

Learning Computing through Creating and Connecting

Despite increased cultural awareness of computing, programming remains inaccessible to many young people. In response to this challenge, MIT Media Lab researchers are developing Scratch, which combines an authoring environment for interactive media projects with an online platform for sharing those projects. The first Web extra at http://youtu.be/2XiOK4OzAaE is a video overview of Scratch and ScratchEd, showing the authoring environment for interactive media projects as well as the sharing platform. The second Web extra at http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tip_bar=getStarted helps visitors get started on their first Scratch activity where they can experience its authoring and sharing environments.

Scratch: creating and sharing interactive media

Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu) is a new programming language that makes it easy to create interactive stories, music, games, art, and animations - and share those creations on the web. In a little over a year, more than 47,000 members have contributed over 300,000 projects online. Scratch presents powerful opportunities for learning - as people program and share with Scratch, they learn to think creatively, plan systematically, and work collaboratively, while also learning important computational ideas. In this seminar, participants will have a unique opportunity to work with the creative team that developed Scratch. Join members of the Scratch Team from MIT Media Lab for hands-on experiences with Scratch, explorations of how collaboration is supported by Scratch, and design-oriented activities for further supporting collaboration. Bring your laptop - no prior experience with Scratch is necessary!

Blocks-based programming languages: simplifying programming for different audiences with different goals

In this panel, the moderator, who has expertise in computer science education and HCI, but with no ties to any particular blocks-based programming environment in particular, will provide a brief overview of the state of the field of visual programming for education generally, and blocks-based visual programming environments and the languages that go with them more specifically. As early as in 1986, blocks-based visual programming environments were conceived of and built as research studies (Glinert & Smith, 1986)). However, the last five to ten years have seen a proliferation of these kinds of programming languages. Scratch and Alice are probably the most widely known of these programming interfaces, but there are many. Among these, many share common traits: the goal of simplifying the syntax of programming, a related goal of making what were once difficult tasks relegated to arcane languages simpler, and often another related goal of opening computer programming up to a wider audience than has recently traditionally engaged in programming activities. The moderator will be followed by four panelists, representing four blocks-based programming environments that share these affordances, but which more interestingly, are distinct in a number of ways. These panelists, experts in MIT App Inventor, Scratch, Looking Glass, and ToolBlox, respectively, will each have ten minutes to discuss their respective language and the possibility-space it aims to simplify. Specifically, each language will be examined from three perspectives: the reason the tool was created, the target audience for the tool, and how the tool engages those users in computational thinking and learning to program. The moderator will then lead a substantive discussion with the audience and panel members on the material presented.

CSCW and education: viewing education as a site of work practice

Educational institutions, whether they are formal or informal, present a work environment in which technology, and social and cultural interactions mediate unfolding work. The interaction between CSCW and the work of education can hold great potential for both improving the educational institutions as well as providing greater explanatory power to CSCW theories that support the work of groups and the designs that are instantiated in those theories. The goal of this workshop is to build a community interested in the intersection between CSCW and educational work practice.

Intergenerational Learning in a Teacher Education Context: The Jared Phenomenon.

While student teachers have essentially unfettered access to the expertise of university instructors and practicum supervisors during their teacher education program, this study explores the potential of employing recent graduates as a source of expertise that current student teachers might draw upon during their program. Over the course of three years, the authors employed recent graduates to facilitate instruction in an experimental 12-month after-degree BEd option at the University of British Columbia. Through the use of surveys and interviews, the authors demonstrate that graduate involvement is a special case of intergenerational learning that they refer to as the Jared Phenomenon. Their analysis offers five characteristics that define the phenomenon, outlines the contexts in which this definition is applicable, and points to a set of dilemmas that arise from its application. They recommend the judicious use of recent graduates as instructors for current students as an important and underutilised resource in teacher education.