Tag: Scratch

Read Group Overview ‹ Lifelong Kindergarten – MIT Media Lab

Engaging people in creative learning experiences

Mitchel Resnick wrote Lifelong Kindergarten for those who care about “kids, learning, and creativity.” The book revolves around kindergarten, “the greatest invention of the previous thousand years.” One of the key features of kindergarten, according to Resnick, is the creative learning spiral, where children develop and refine as thinkers through experience. Sadly, this is often lost as students progress through education, where the focus becomes about instruction and information.

At the heart of Resnick’s idea of ‘lifelong kindergarten’ are 4P’s:

  • Projects: “A project-based approach is the best path to fluency, whether for writing or coding.”
  • Passion: “low floors and high ceilings, but we also add another dimension: wide walls. That is, we try to design technologies that support and suggest a wide range of different types of projects.”
  • Peers: “Good teachers and good mentors move fluidly among the roles of catalyst, consultant, connector, and collaborator.”
  • Play: “Play doesn’t require open spaces or expensive toys; it requires a combination of curiosity, imagination, and experimentation.”

The book ends with ten tips for parents, teachers and developers. As well as warning that although these ideas may be simple, they are not easy.

It’s not easy to put these ideas into practice. John Dewey, the pioneer of the progressive education movement, wrote that his approach was “simple but not easy.” That is, Dewey’s ideas were relatively easy to describe, but difficult to implement. The same is true for the Reggio approach—and for the four P’s of creative learning.
The path to the creative society isn’t easy or straightforward. We need to engage many people in many ways.

Source: Lifelong Kindergarten by Mitchel Resnick

This book had me wanting to go back and reread Gary Stager’s Invent to Learn, especially with the focus on Scratch, and The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation.

It was also interesting reading this alongside Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School. Both books provide differing solutions to the problems of education. I wonder if the answer is, as always, somewhere in the middle.

Continue reading “📚 Lifelong Kindergarten (Mitchel Resnick)”

Bookmarked Programming with Scratch – An educator guide. (ReconfigurED.)

Scratch is a graphical programming language and online community where users can program and share interactive media such as stories, games and animations. Whilst it is targeted at 8 to 16 year olds, anyone of any age can write a program in Scratch.

Anthony Speranza provides a useful introduction to Scratch. An often underrated application, Scratch provides an insight into some of the ways that the web works, particularly in regards to ‘blocks’. Sometimes it feels as if you are not really coding unless you are working with some form of language. The problem is that this is not how the world works. More often than not it is about building on the ideas (and snippets) of others. Look at WordPress’ move to Gutenberg. In addition to this, we interact with ‘blocks’ each and everyday in the applications and sites that we use. One only needs to use something like Mozilla’s X-Ray Goggles to start realising that inherent complexity within the web.
Bookmarked Screen Time? How about Creativity Time? – Mitchel Resnick – Medium by Mitchel Resnick (Medium)

Excerpt from my book Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play

Resnick discusses some of the problems with the way that we see technology. He points out that the notion of ‘technology’ encompasses more than an iPhone:

Techno-skeptics often argue that children should spend more time with crayons and watercolors, rather than tablets and laptops. But they tend to forget that crayons and watercolors were viewed as “advanced technologies” at some point in the past. We see them differently now because they’ve become integrated into the culture. Computer pioneer Alan Kay likes to say that technology is anything that was invented after you were born. For kids growing up today, laptops and mobile phones aren’t high-tech tools — they’re everyday tools, just like crayons and watercolors.

He also explains that the problem with technology is not necessarily the tool itself, but the way in which it is used. With this in mind he suggests that we try and maximise ‘creative’ time

Spending all your time on any one thing is problematic. But the most important issue with screen time is not quantity but quality. There are many ways of interacting with screens; it doesn’t make sense to treat them all the same. Time spent playing a violent video game is different from time spent texting with friends, which is different from time spent researching a report for school, which is different from time spent creating and sharing an interactive story with Scratch. Rather than trying to minimize screen time, I think parents and teachers should try to maximize creative time.