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| A worldwide network of after-school centers where young people (ages 10-18) from low-income commmunities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. |  |
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| Scratch is a new programming environment that kids can use to create their own animated stories, video games, and interactive art—and share their creations with one another across the Internet. |  |
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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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| Current Projects: | |
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| We are creating an online community, called the Computer Clubhouse Village, to connect people at Computer Clubhouse after-school centers around the world. |  |
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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 developing the next generation of invention kits for kids, expanding the range of what kids can design, create, and invent. |  |
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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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| ScratchR is a web-based community where people can share animated
stories, games and interactive art created in the Scratch programming
language—ScratchR is to programming what YouTube is for video. |
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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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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 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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| We are exploring if certain careful interventions in playgrounds could enhance current activities and also prepare environments for new kinds of play patterns. | |
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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 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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| 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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| We are developing a telephone-based, neighborhood news system, called "What's Up?", that will make it easier for youth to collect, share, and analyze information about personally meaningful places, people, and opportunities in their neighborhoods. |  |
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| We aimed to enable youth-led social change in low-income communities by designing new tools and education activities to transform existing community technology centers into community-empowering spaces. | |
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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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