Original posted by Brogan Pratt on May 29, 2019
Mitchel Resnick is known as the godfather of Scratch Game Creator. He is the Lego Papert Professor of Learning Research at MIT, the Director of Okawa Center, and the Director of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT. With an impressive number of developmental tool creations under his belt, he has supported:
- The creation of Scratch game creator, along with co-founders Brian Silverman and Paula Bonta
- The building blocks of “LEGO Mindstorms” coding software
However, he is most well known for the creation of the visual programming language “Scratch”, but often times is referred to as “blockly”. If you’re ever seen code like this before in an elementary school coding app,
Then you can thank Mitchel.
Mitchel’s guiding theory behind Scratch comes from Constructionist pedagogy, which is essentially constructivism in the physical environment (rather than the contructing of mental schemas, it is the physical act of building projects that best creates these new schemas), and focuses on project based learning styles. Mitchel and his co-founders clearly have a drive for scientific research and a venture spirit judging by the enormous success of their non-profit venture. They know how to create valuable content, as well as how to market this content to the broader community; perhaps not all on their own with help from their other group members and the MIT university as well.
Scratch Game Creator
If you’ve never played scratch before, you can check out some well known top games here. The experience is best on a desktop computer, but has recently become functional on mobile devices as well (though it should be noted the functionality is not perfect).
Scratch allows users to create their own video games in a visual language. Check out the link above for some fairly impressive coding feats for the platforms abilities. You’d be hard pressed to believe that students made these!
Scratch is a completely free, not-for-profit educational resource. Awesome.
The Scratch Team
It is difficult to narrow down the scratch team, having had over 63 members in the past who have had an involvement in the program’s development and current state. Almost all members have been Masters or PHD students at MIT, or have been visiting scientists, researchers, and programmers from various other universities around the globe. With how popular Scratch is, and how well the platform performs, it is clear that this team definitely has what it takes to make, and continue to develop, a successful not-for-profit learning venture.
The first time saw “Scratch” was when my teenager told me her school would have a coding competition and she and her classmates were challenged by their teacher to learn themselves. I learned coding when I was younger and knew it could be boring and didn’t think a child could learn themselves, however when I played around with Scratch myself I was impressed with how user friendly it was and how it transferred traditional hard coding into visual and fun blocks of code snippets that could be built together to create a larger program. It is a fun and practical application and since my own experience I have highly recommended it for children and teenagers who are interested in learning coding.
I think Scratch is fantastic. I first came across it when our company decided to have a “coding” themed summer camp for elementary-aged children. Having no coding background, I started to do my research into how to teach the concept of coding to young kids. Through my research, I realized that learning about the logic behind coding was so meaningful for kids! They learn how to give instructions, and that the sequence of these instructions matter. Scratch is great because it uses block coding where everything is visual. I found it really difficult to use, but when I showed it to a student in grade 3, she got it right away. The design of it is quite intuitive to children. I also highly recommend it!
I was considering copying and pasting this from the previous course, but you beat me to it. And I thank you for that, because it re-assured me that this is a very useful product. However, coming from inside the walls of the powerhouse of technology, MIT, there is no need for re-assurance. There are also a couple Canadians to thank for the creation of Scratch: Brian Silverman, and Paula Bonta (from Argentina).
The open-source, sharing, re-mixing essence of Scratch is hidden in its name: to scratch, in coding terms, means to take code, re-vamp it, and make something new and useful for others to use or to scratch from – I love this double entendre!
I have been using Scratch in my middle school classroom for several years, and have paired it up with Code.org’s (featured in my post this week) Blockly so that younger grades are getting the programming concepts that Emily alludes to above from Code.org, and then take those concepts to work in Scratch on their own projects. Really, programmers are likely to work with more than one programming language. To show the similarities and growing pains of learning new programming languages through these block-based, drag and drop languages adds depth to the learning.
Scratch is a great way to learn to code. Mitchel Resnick’s approachto allow young students to code in a simple manner, helped shaped young creativepotential. It fits well with the core competencies of the BC curriculum, specifically creativethinking. The generation of new ideas and concepts. From a professional standpoint,I feel that creativity needs to be fostered more so students are able to learnwell in our ever-changing world.