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| With Scratch, young people can create interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations—and share their creations with one another online. In the process, they learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. |
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| A worldwide network of after-school centers where young people (ages 10-18) from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. |  |
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| Current Projects: | |
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| To foster and better understand collaboration in the Scratch Online Community, we created Collab Camp, a month-long event in which Scratch community members form teams (“collabs”) to work together on Scratch projects. |
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| The Computer Clubhouse Village is an online community that connects people at Computer Clubhouse after-school centers around the world. |  |
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| In Family Creativity Workshops, we engage parents and their children in workshops to design and invent together with Scratch, a programming language where people can create their own interactive animations, games, and stories. |
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| Learning Creative Learning is an experimental online course, putting greater emphasis on peer-to-peer learning, hands-on projects, and sustainable communities. |  |
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| We are extending Scratch to provide opportunities for children to explore and experiment with data. Children can create programs to collect data through surveys, manipulate data from online sources, and analyze data through visualizations. |
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| Map Scratch is an extension of Scratch that enables kids to program with maps within their Scratch projects. With Map Scratch, kids can create interactive tours, games, and data visualizations with real-world geographical data and maps. |
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| MelodyMorph lets you construct melodies and play improvised music. |
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| Scratch Day is a network of face-to-face local gatherings, on the same day in all parts of the world, where people can meet, share, and learn more about Scratch. |
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| Singing Fingers allows children to fingerpaint with sound. |
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| Archived Projects: | |
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| Active Essays were forms of narrative expression in which computational objects were integrated with text, graphics, and video. | |
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| The Adventures in Modeling Project introduced students and teachers to the process of designing, creating, and analyzing their own models of complex, dynamic systems using StarLogo. | |
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| We are working on a tool called AskMobi that enables adolescents to engage in social science inquiry about issues important to them. | |
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| Babble Baubles, wearable bracelet-like devices for kids that send secret messages composed of changing patterns of color, explored how kids can learn to construct language conventions and encrypt and decrypt codes. | |
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| We developed new computational tools to engage children in scientific inquiry through designing and building. | |
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| Block Exchange is a website where Scratch users can share data sets and data sources in the form of Scratch programming blocks. | |
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| We created a computational construction kit for the blind and visually impaired by modifying the user interface of our Cricket programmable bricks and adding capabilities such as speech recognition and speech synthesis. | |
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| We developed a new approach to computer programming, creating new languages with low thresholds but high ceilings, that enabled kids (and other novice programmers) to make a smooth transition from simple commands to complex programs. | |
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| With Color Code, you can create computer programs that respond to colors of objects in the physical world. | |
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| The Clubhouse Quilt was a vehicle for kids in the Computer Clubhouse Network to share their diverse projects (artwork, music, movies, poetry, and 3-D animation) with the rest of the Clubhouse community. | |
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| Imagine a computer as just another craft material, along with colored paper, markers, pipe cleaners, and felt. What would you create? | |
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| The Constructopedia was a browsable, interactive database, designed to help children build structures, mechanisms, and computer programs to help make connections to the mathematical and scientific ideas underlying those constructions. | |
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| Craft Computing was an artisanal pattern CAD software, based on the Adolfo Best Maugard drawing technique (Best Maugard, 1923, 1927), developed to teach Mexican-style drawing to children. | |
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| We worked with the residents at Camfield Estates, a housing development in Roxbury, MA, to examine how new technology-supported activities can help to increase social capital and to activate cultural capital within the housing development. | |
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| With Crickets, kids can create musical sculptures, interactive jewelry, dancing creatures, and other artistic inventions -- and learn important math, science, and engineering ideas in the process. |  |
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| DesignBlocks is a derivative of the Scratch project that focuses on 2-dimensional digital design. With DesignBlocks, artists control lines, shapes, colors and images to create generative and interactive artworks. | |
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| The Display for Indirect Collaboration Environments (DICE) system collected dynamic electronic artwork and displayed it in shared spaces while reacting to people in the surrounding environment. | |
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| We are adding digital capabilities to the traditional toys of childhood, and, in the process, redefining how and what children learn. | |
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| With Drawdio, you can turn everyday objects (paintbrushes, trees, even the kitchen sink) into musical instruments -- and gain a new appreciation of the world around you. | |
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| Ejewels workshops enabled participants to use a combination of basic electronic and craft materials to create jewelry with lights that glow and flash, while exploring a diverse set of scientific and social investigations. | |
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| We are developing new technologies and activities to help people develop as "eThinkers," with the skills, knowledge, and ways of thinking that can lead to success in a networked society. | |
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| We are helping people understand the world of Scratch, a new programming language for kids, with a video tutorial using a show and tell approach. | |
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| We developed a robotics programming language, with the goal of empowering children to construct more sophisticated behaviors for their robots, and to learn more by doing so. | |
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| "Folk Computing" supported face-to-face communication and community, modeled on the communicative process of folklore. | |
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| Glowdoodle is free software for painting with light, or painting with anything. | |
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| We are helping young people learn by constructing physical objects called "Hook-Ups" that can control games, animations, and other computer programs. | |
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| We are providing professional development to educators in after-school and community technology centers that serve youth in low-income urban and rural communities, in the US and internationally. |  |
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| Interactive C was a programming environment that gave users the ability to control a robot by using C commands and additional functions tailored specifically for robotics. | |
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| We are developing the next generation of invention kits for kids, expanding the range of what kids can design, create, and invent. | |
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| Jots helps people reflect on their own learning process as they use the Scratch programming environment. | |
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| Learning About Motions was designed specifically as a tool to help young elementary school children explore the fundamentals of mechanical motion and combined LEGO-based motion modules with a search tool. | |
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| This research project included the development of technologies to facilitate robot-building workshops and the evaluation of students' learning processes when engaged in the rich pedagogical activity of robot building. | |
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| "Logo Blocks" met the challenge of creating a programming language for kids that is both powerful and easy to use. | |
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| We are developing tools that enable kids to create interactive media for their mobile phones—and to share their creations with one another. | |
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| We are extending our Scratch programming language to interact across networks, so that kids can see how their individual ideas and creations can connect to the Internet, to their friends, to their communities, and to the world. |  |
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| "Participatory Simulations" used tiny, wearable computers to create a new generation of educational activities in which students can learn about dynamic systems by participating in simulations of the systems. | |
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| We are developing a suite of "constructionist cooperative" tools called Pearls of Wisdom (PoW) which enable youth to create computational artifacts containing how-to project-design and build information. | |
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| Perspectives was an interactive-art construction kit, designed specifically to help high-school students explore and document the different individual, social, and cultural perspectives that make up human experience. | |
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| We established the Playful Invention and Exploration (PIE) Network to engage the general public in more inventive and creative uses of digital technologies. |  |
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| Programmable Beads were created as computational jewelry that children (of all ages) can play with and learn from. | |
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| We are extending the child's construction kit, building computational power directly into LEGO bricks. Children are using these Programmable Bricks to build everything from robotic creatures to interactive kinetic sculptures, and, in the process, learning | |
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| The Robotic Art Studio was a suite of tools and activities to introduce artists to robotic/electronic media, allowing them to design and create early in the learning process yet fully supporting further explorations in the future. | |
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| We have designed and implemented a seven-part workshop to foster mutual understanding, collaborative problem-solving, and self-expression by creating rich, interactive, multi-threaded narratives with Scratch. | |
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| With the Scratch Board, people can use sensors to control interactive stories and games that they create with Scratch. | |
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| We are creating a new, more accessible way to program the Arduino, based on the Scratch language, so that more people can become "makers" with electronics. | |
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| Can we extend Scratch so that it is suitable for a full-semester introduction to programming and computational thinking? | |
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| We are creating a special version of Scratch to make it easier for everyone to create interactive pets, houses, trees, and other interactive objects in virtual worlds like Second Life. | |
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| ScratchEd is an online community where Scratch educators can share stories, exchange resources, ask questions, and find people. | |
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| ScratchR is the engine underlying the Scratch online community, allowing people to publish and share programmable media. | |
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| We are creating computationally enhanced children's blocks, called "System Blocks," that make it easier for kids to explore and study complex concepts of system dynamics and causalities. | |
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| We are working on Flow Blocks, a dynamic process simulation tool that lets children playfully explore concepts such as counting, probability, looping, and branching. |  |
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| Tangible Programming with LEGO bricks used a set of electronic stackable LEGO bricks to act as a programming interface to a number of computational environments, including the behavior of children's toy cars and trains, and music synthesizers.
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| The Tiles were a construction kit, in which powerful computation and communication were built into kid-scale blocks. | |
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| In the tradition of baseball cards, Pogs, and Beanie Babies, we created a new generation of toys that let children trade digital (rather than physical) objects. | |
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| Twinkle lets you create computer programs with colors. Use crayons, LEGO bricks, a striped shirt, fall leaves, or anything with else with colors. | |
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| The Village Visualizer enables learners to explore their own social networks, helping them identify other people with shared interests and experiences. | |
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| What's Up is a telephone-based, neighborhood news system that makes it easier for youth to organize and promote personally meaningful local community events. | |
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| Youth and Community Connections examined ways of using new technologies to help break down the social and cultural barriers that have historically existed between various communities in the Boston area. | |
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