This Cyberlearning Integration and Deployment (INDP) project brings together an interdisciplinary research team from the MIT Media Lab, the Digital Media and Learning Hub at University of California Irvine, and Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society to explore development and use of new types of online tools, activities, and gatherings to engage more young people in developing computational fluency, particularly youth from groups currently underrepresented in computing. The project builds on the success of the NSF-funded Scratch programming language and online community (http://scratch.mit.edu), where more than 1.5 million young people have created interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations based on their interests. The Coding for All project aims to provide new pathways into Scratch for youth from populations that are not currently drawn in easily to technological and scientific discourse and activities. The PIs are designing and refining a variety of interest-based microworlds -- introductory programming environments that are customized to particular interests of youngsters in those populations -- to provide easier and more inviting entry points for getting started with coding, and they aim to develop guidelines for designing microworlds that are simple enough not to be overwhelming, engaging enough to draw youngsters in, rich enough to allow creative expression, and tuned well enough to the interests and prior knowledge of new participants to foster curiosity and learning. In addition, the team is exploring how to use personnel in libraries and other spaces where low-income youth congregate to support initial introduction to and engagement with these microworlds and developing and refining tools to support interest-based on-line hangouts and unconferences, where young people who become engaged through these microworlds can meet peers and mentors to share ideas, form collaborations, and increase their programming and expressive capabilities. The PIs are collecting much data about the engagement and participation of youngsters, the development of their skills and understanding, and the development of their interests, and their analysis will contribute to deeper understanding of needed supports, pathways, and outcomes related to computational fluency. This project addresses the need to draw in and promote learning among those in populations not served well by current educational practices and important national priorities in workforce development, equity, and the need for a technologically fluent public. The project's tools and activities will provide alternative pathways into coding, increasing opportunities for young people in non-dominant communities to develop computational fluency. The focus on public libraries explores how to use public educational institutions most geared towards serving the technology needs and diverse interests of non-dominant communities in taking advantage of new online learning opportunities. The findings from this research will inform researchers and practitioners concerned with STEM-related learning, online educational resources, equity in education, and cyberlaw.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Mizuko ItoMitchel ResnickNatalie RuskUrs Gasser
This collaborative project between Tufts University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is researching and developing a new version of the Scratch programming language to be called ScratchJr, designed specifically for early childhood education (K-2). The current version of Scratch, which is widely implemented, is intended for ages 8-16 and is not developmentally appropriate for young children. This work will provide research-based evidence regarding young children's abilities to use an object-oriented programming language and to study the impact this has on the children's learning of scientific concepts and procedures. The team will develop ScratchJr in an iterative cycle, testing it in both in the Devtech lab at Tufts and the Eliot Pearson lab school and with a wider network of early childhood partners. At the end of the three-year project, ScratchJr will have been tested with approximately 350 students in K-2, 40 parents, and 58 early childhood educators. ScratchJr will have three components: 1) a developmentally appropriate interface, with both touch screen and keyboard/mouse options; 2) an embedded library of curricular modules with STEM content to meet federal and state mandates in early childhood education; and 3) an on-line resource and community for early childhood educators and parents. The research questions focus on whether ScratchJr can help these young children learn foundational knowledge structures such as sequencing, causality, classification, composition, symbols, patterns, estimation, and prediction; specific content knowledge; and problem solving skills. This interdisciplinary proposal makes contributions to the fields of learning technologies, early childhood education and human computer interaction. ScratchJr has the potential for broad implementation in both formal and informal settings.
The ScratchEd project, led by faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and professionals at the Education Development Center, is designing, developing, and studying an innovative model for professional development (PD) of teachers who use the Scratch computer programming environment to help their students learn computational thinking. The fundamental hypothesis of the project is that engagement in workshops and on-line activities of the ScratchEd professional development community will enhance teacher knowledge about computational thinking, their practice of design-based instruction, and their students' learning of key computational thinking concepts and habits of mind. The effectiveness of the ScratchEd project is being evaluated by research addressing four specific questions: (1) What are the levels of teacher participation in the various ScratchEd PD offerings and what do teachers think of these experiences? (2) Do teachers who participate in ScratchEd PD activities change their use of Scratch in classroom instruction to create design-based learning opportunities? (3) Do the students of teachers who participate in the ScratchEd PD activities show evidence of developing an understanding of computational thinking concepts and processes? (4) When the research instruments developed for the evaluation are made available for teachers in the Scratch community to use for self-evaluation, how do teachers make use of them? Because both computational thinking and design-based instruction are complex activities, the project research is using a combination of survey, interview, and artifact analysis methods to answer the questions. The ScratchEd professional development and research work will provide important insight into the challenge of helping teachers create productive learning environments for development of computational thinking. Those efforts will also yield a set of evaluation tools that can be integrated into the ScratchEd resources and used by others to study development of computational thinking and design-based instruction.
This project's aim is to understand collaboration, cooperation, and learning in the context of a large, distributed virtual organization consisting of children and teachers building web-based simulations and animations using the Scratch software. The PIs will study the nature and patterns of cooperation in the Scratch decentralized learning environment, establish principles to guide the development of systems that foster cooperative attitudes and behaviors, and develop strategies to cultivate computational-thinking capacities that are important for productive cooperation and problem-solving in virtual organizations. The Scratch community consists of over 400,000 registered members discussing, remixing, and reusing more than a million projects. The project is a collaborative project with researchers from MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania drawn from computer science, psychology, child development, education, organizational science, and economics. Using a novel combination of experimental and ethnographic methods, the research will provide insights into how young people cooperate in virtual organizations, their attitudes and motivations related to cooperation, and their development of computational-thinking skills and capacities necessary for productive cooperation and creative learning. The researchers expect that the findings will contribute to the design and understanding of more effective virtual organizations, particularly in the areas of learning, education, and cooperative creation. The methods used include observational studies, design interventions, and field experiments. The test bed will be the Scratch community and the evaluations will be done by mining the online record of cooperation in the construction of new simulations and animations. The outcomes of the project will include an improved Scratch environment, design principles for the construction of distributed virtual organizations that encourage cooperation and co-construction of knowledge and artifacts, and new methods of teaching computational thinking in an engaging environment. The Scratch community of 400,000 members will be part of this work. This project is potentially transformative because of the engaging nature of this particular application, because of its applicability to similar virtual communities, and because of its promise to reach a diverse community of learners.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Mitchel ResnickNatalie RuskJohn MaloneyYochai BenklerYasmin Kafai
Investigators from the MIT Media Lab will develop and study a new generation of the Scratch programming platform, designed to help young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively -- essential skills for success in the 21st century. With Scratch, young people (ages 8 and up) can program their own interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations, then share their creations with others online. Young people around the world have already shared more than 1 million projects on the Scratch community website (http://scratch.mit.edu). The new generation, called Scratch 2.0, will be fully integrated into the Internet, so that young people can more seamlessly share and collaborate on projects, access online data, and program interactions with social media. The research is divided into two strands: (1) Technological infrastructure for creative collaboration. With Scratch 2.0, people will be able to design and program new types of web-based interactions and services. For example, they will be able to program interactions with social-media websites (such as Facebook), create visualizations with online data, and program their own collaborative applications. (2) Design experiments for creative collaboration. As the team develops Scratch 2.0, they will run online experiments to study how their design decisions influence the ways in which people collaborate on creative projects, as well as their attitudes towards collaboration. This work builds on a previous NSF grant (ITR-0325828) that supported the development of Scratch. Since its public launch in 2007, Scratch has become a vibrant online community, in which young people program and share interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations - and, in the process, learn important computational concepts and strategies for designing, problem solving, and collaborating. Each day, members of the Scratch community upload nearly 1500 new Scratch projects to the website - on average, a new project almost every minute. In developing Scratch 2.0, the team will focus on two questions from the NSF Program Solicitation: (1) Will the research lead to the development of new technologies to support human creativity? (2) Will the research lead to innovative educational approaches in computer science, science, or engineering that reward creativity?
Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit of the project is based on its study of how new technologies can foster creativity and collaboration. The investigators will conduct design experiments to examine how new features of Scratch 2.0 engage young people in new forms of creative expression, collaboration, learning, and metadesign. Young people are already interacting with many cloud-based services (such as YouTube and Facebook). But Scratch 2.0 is fundamentally different in that it aims to engage people in programming their own projects and activities in the cloud. With Scratch 2.0, young people won't just interact with the cloud, they will create in the cloud. The goal is to democratize the development of cloud-based activities, so that everyone can become an active contributor to the cloud, not just a consumer of cloud-based services. This development and study of Scratch 2.0 will lead to new insights into strategies for engaging young people in activities that cultivate collaboration and creativity. Broader Impacts: The broader impact of the project is based on its ability to broaden participation in programming and computer science. The current version of Scratch has already helped attract a broader diversity of students to computer science compared to other programming platforms. The investigators expect that the collaboration and social-media features of Scratch 2.0 will resonate with the interests of today's youth and further broaden participation. Integration of Scratch into the introductory computer science course at Harvard led to a sharp reduction in the number of students dropping the course, and an increase in the retention of female students. There have been similar results in pre-college courses. The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) calls Scratch a promising practice for increasing gender diversity in IT.