BigShinyThing

Scratch is a free programming tool that allows anyone to create their own animated stories, video games and interactive artworks has been developed. Primarily aimed at children, Scratch does not require prior knowledge of complex computer languages (although, given the apparent hacker mentality of most digital natives this might not be an issue).

Instead, it uses a simple graphical interface that allows programs to be assembled like building blocks.

“These days, kids interact with all kinds of dynamic things on screen but it is usually a one-way street — they are usually interacting with things that other people have created,” said Professor Mitchel Resnick, one of the researchers at the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT which developed Scratch. Resnick also invented Lego Mindstorms, a robotics toolkit often used in teaching.

With Scratch we want to let kids to be the creators. We want them to create interesting dynamic things on the computer.

The program works by making the act of creating a computer program more like building with Lego bricks.

“Kids make programs by snapping blocks together,” said Professor Resnick, whose position is in part supported by the toy company (way to survive in the 21st century, Lego!).

Objects and characters, chosen from a menu and created in a paint editor or simply cut and pasted off the web, are animated by snapping together different “action” blocks into stacks.

“They don’t have to worry about the obscure punctuation and syntax common in most programming languages,” he said.

Each block contains a separate command, such as “move” or “play drum” and each action can be modified from a drop-down menu. Blocks can only be stacked if they fit together.

So, for example, if someone wanted to animate a cat walking across the screen they could modify the move block to tell the cat to walk forward 10 steps.

If they then wanted the cat to bang a drum as it walked, they could stack the play-drum block underneath, choosing a sound for the instrument and how long each beat should last.

Other actions, such as speaking, changing colour or triggering music, can then be added to complete the animation.

Scratch is inspired by the method Hip Hop DJs use to mix and scratch records to create new sounds. “With Scratch, our goal is to allow people to mix together all kinds of media, not just sounds, in creative ways,” said Professor Resnick.

“We want people to start from existing materials — grabbing an image, grabbing some sound, maybe even bits of someone else’s program and then extending them and mixing them to make them their own.”

Digital creations can then be shared on a site where users can watch other creations and even borrow elements from other Scratch projects to act as raw materials for their own.

Scratch is now available to download for free and works with both Apple Macs and Windows PCs. If you are reading this close to the launch date (15th May 2007) you might want to wait a little while — coverage from digg.com and the BBC et al caused such a huge amount of interest that their server crashed.

AND a version of the tool is also currently being developed for the XO laptop, designed by the One Laptop Per Child Project.

Source: BBC.

An interesting snippet from the if:book blog:

[...] the word processing software being bundled into the [One Laptop Per Child Initiative's] 100-dollar laptops will all be wiki-based, putting the focus on student collaboration over mesh networks. This may not sound like such a big deal, but just take a moment to ponder the implications of having all class writing assignments being carried out [on] wikis. The different sorts of skills and attitudes that collaborating on everything might nurture. There a million things that could go wrong with the [...] project, but you can’t accuse its developers of lacking bold ideas about education.

Now there’s a thing. Its been a long time (anyone remember Smalltalk?) since we’ve really heard of any educational technology taking such a radical leap of faith. Whether the benefits of participatory co-creation outweigh its downsides is up for question on many levels. But it’s nice to see some educationalists embracing rather than censoring the tools of the zeitgeist. (more…)

This story actually broke last year but it’s too important to miss. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab has spun out a non-profit association called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) to design, manufacture and distribute laptops that will be provided to governments at cost and issued to children by schools on the basis of one per child. The machines will be hardy, use open source Linux-based software and so energy-efficient that hand cranking alone can generate sufficient power for operation. They will fold up into eBook mode for reading only. Mesh networking will give many machines internet access from one connection.

According to MIT, at least 50% of a modern laptop’s purchase price is taken up by the cost of sales, marketing, distribution and profit. OLPC has none of these costs. The machine will not be available in shops, although in order to discourage a grey market they will authorise production of a commercial version, where a share of profits will be dedicated to further lowering the cost of the OLPC machine. Distribution in most cases will instead piggyback on existing textbook channels.

The remaining 50% of the cost of a laptop can be divided into roughly two equal parts: the display and everything else. The display is the real technical challenge in terms of keeping costs down. The Media Lab at MIT has therefore developed short term ways to bring the cost of the display to close to $30 per machine. Longer term solutions may be innovations like E Ink (which MIT invented) that could eventually be as cheap as 10 cents per square inch for a full colour, sunlight-readable screen with better than textbook resolution in print mode. As for the ‘everything else’ (the processor, memory and power management): modern laptops use about 75% of their own processing capacity to support hefty software applications and the operating system itself. Hence the adoption of the ’skinny’ (and free) Linux operating system.

Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, has now officially introduced the $100 laptop in The Economist saying:

Will the $100 laptop happen? Yes. When? Late 2006. Where? Certainly in Brazil, Thailand and Egypt to begin with; we hope in China too. But the ‘market’ is global, more than 1 billion schoolchildren worldwide, for whom one laptop per child is the goal.