High powered programmers may soon be moving over for an unlikely source, kids. At a recent conference at MIT students and educators came from around the world to discuss the uses, benefits, and possible improvements for Scratch, a programming interface.
Mitchel Resnick
Learning Research, MIT Media Lab
So we developed Scratch to let kids, and actually people of all ages to create their own interactive stories and games and animations online. Because we don't think people should only use computers to click on websites, play games, and chat, but be able to express their own ideas online.
And that's what users are doing. Since the launch of Scratch about a year ago there have been 350,000 downloads of the free development software and nearly 200,000 projects uploaded. The projects are uploaded to Scratch's website where users can view them, trade suggestions or even download them and tweak the code.
Users seem to like the graphical interface of Scratch.
Lilya
13 year old student from Russia
I like the fact that you can actually see what you're doing, see what you're programming. So you can snap blocks. There's not a piece of text that you can't understand. You can snap the blocks, play with them, experiment with them.
Lilya's developed more than 200 projects for Scratch partly because the program is easier to use than other software.
Jorem
13 year old student from Belgium
All of the programs really have a steep learning curve. You have to learn everything at the same time. With Scratch it's really easy to drag a few blocks and see how it works.
Jorem developed this game called Tetris Survivor where you have to move your purple block across the screen without hitting any of the others. He even included the music from the original Tetris.
In addition to the software are input devices called Picoboards. They plug into the computer via USB and have light sensors, sound sensors and other input methods.
Amon Millner
PhD student, MIT Media Lab
So I'm going to show you an example of me controlling this Scratch application through talking to the sensor board. And you can see the bird mimicks the loudness of my voice. So you can see as I talk into this scratch sensor board the bird is talking back to me.
Another project developed by a student emulates the popular game Guitar Hero.
While Scratch can be especially useful in computer classes, it's not limited to just those courses.
Karen Randall
Teacher in Minnesota
I was one of the places where Scratch was beta tested so we started doing it three years ago. I'm not a technology teacher, I'm a regular classroom teacher so to have time to use Scratch I integrate it into other projects. So we've done things like, in a unit on the history of life through time, the kids study creation stories from around the world and then animated a creation story of their choice.
As always there are improvements that can be made.
Greg Benedis-Grav
Science teacher in New York
I think for older kids they could add some more features, but for second grade it was just right, they didn't need anymore features.
One very ambitious 13 year old enjoys Scratch, but is looking for more challenges too.
Jasper
13 year old student from New York
It was a good introduction because I guess before I learned about Scratch I was playing with Flash, but it's complicated and hard to jump into without much help, but Scratch was a good introduction to help me learn some other stuff.
Scratch will have more features with a new version that will be available this summer. So far the program has primarily been focused on English speaking countries, but this summer's update will include support for 30 different languages. The software for different platforms is something Resnick hopes will happen soon.
Mitchel Resnick
We're also looking to see Scratch move on to other platforms in addition to laptop and desktop machines we're working on versions for low cost laptops and even mobile devices.
One low cost laptop that it will be coming to is the OLPC, Nicholas Negroponte's brain child, who also happened to found the MIT Media Lab where Scratch was developed.
For the IDG News Service, I'm Nick Barber reporting in Cambridge.
