Programming for Everyone: How Scratch is Making Programming More Accessible, Meaningful, and Social

March 3, 2009
Mitchel Resnick | MIT Media Lab

I will discuss ideas, experiences, and opportunities surrounding Scratch – our new media-rich programming system designed especially for people who haven’t previously imagined themselves as programmers.

Since its public launch in 2007, the Scratch website (http://scratch.mit.edu) has become a vibrant online community, with people sharing, discussing, and remixing one another’s interactive stories and games. Scratch has been called “the YouTube of interactive media.” Each day, Scratchers from around the world upload more than 1000 new projects to the site, with source code and media objects freely available for sharing. The collection of projects is wildly diverse: video games, interactive newsletters, science simulations, virtual tours, birthday cards, animated dance contests, interactive tutorials, and many others, all programmed in Scratch’s graphical building-block programming language.

The core audience is between the ages of 8 and 16, though there is a sizeable group of adult participants as well. As Scratchers program and share interactive projects, they learn important mathematical and computational concepts, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively – essential skills for the 21st century.

Speaker Details

Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab, develops new technologies to engage people (especially children) in creative learning experiences. His research group (in addition to its work on Scratch) developed the “programmable bricks” that were the basis for the LEGO MindStorms robotics kits. Resnick co-founded the Computer Clubhouse project, an international network of after-school learning centers for youth from low-income communities. Resnick earned a BS in physics from Princeton, and an MS and PhD in computer science from MIT. He worked for five years as a science and technology journalist for Business Week magazine, and he has consulted around the world on the uses of new technologies in education. He is the author or co-author of several books, including Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams.