Saturday, February 5, 2011

Maria's Scratch studio project

This week I have spent a few hours on creating my Scratch project. It is nothing complicated, pretty simple… A boy asking you to go in a music store, listen to music and dance. The audience (you) must type “Yes”, in the textbox to accept his invitation and then enter the store. Once you do that, there is music around with a vinyl disc running and the boy break dancing. Not nearly as complicated as the projects on the Scratch site…





Learn more about this project

So “What’s new about new media?” I think everything is new. New purposes, new affordances, new products. In terms of purposes, it seems that the power of creation, creativity and control is in the hands of the participants. We are not just he audience, not just the consumers, but also, and most importantly, the producers of mew media. New tools give us opportunities for personal expression that has voice by being published.

People’s creativity and powerful ideas are all over the place… I mean, look at that Scratch website… so many complicated commands in programming the animations, games, etc, and all made by kids! I think it is true that given the right tools, kids can develop pretty complicated programming skills.I think this is a great example of what Resnick describes as Powerful learning. It is powerful because it is dynamic, you can see the changes and the outcomes of programming immediately.

It was a challenge for me, because I had to get used to the complicated sequences of programming. It really takes time to get used to all those. But it is a great experience, you can't get bored because it is not static! I think that is a great tool to give flesh and bones to the powerful ideas that Papert talks about.

5 comments:

  1. Fun project, Maria! I typed in 'no' to see if you had set anything to happen if they didn't answer yes. But it did the same thing!

    I wonder if you could use a different block for the answer.

    I was interested how this worked, so I downloaded your Scratch to play with it and I found a new command. Look what I put together -
    http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5175/5420621580_f562bdd8d1_o.jpg

    ReplyDelete
  2. Aha! Yes, that would actually make it a lot better :) Thanks so much, Allison.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Maria - I loved it! I did the same thing as Allison but I typed in burrito =) I was not sure what would happen haha!

    I think you hit on an important point - we are moving from consumers to producers. We are no longer just passively watching media, we are critical, involved, and remixing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. All i have to say is - I love that we are no longer 'passively' watching - but we are engaging in it! But then what? Wow! The future has a lot in store, doesn't it?!

    ReplyDelete