Festival2012/Submit/Programming with Online Data and Maps in Scratch

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Programming with Online Data and Maps in Scratch

  • Title of session: Programming with Online Data and Maps in Scratch
  • Your name and affiliation: Members of MIT Scratch Team, MIT Media Lab (organized by: Sayamindu Dasgupta)
  • Session format: Learning Lab

What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?

The next generation of Scratch, Scratch 2.0 (https://vimeo.com/41683547) is going to be hosted online, as a Cloud based application. With this shift, we are adding a number of features to Scratch that allows it to "plug in" to the web, enabling young programmers using Scratch to collect and store data online, explore coding with online maps, etc. In this session, we are going to focus specifically on these web-connection features of Scratch 2.0, exploring how young programmers can use these features to create interactive mini web-apps in a wide range of genres (eg: interactive stories, games, surveys, etc.). The specific features we are going to focus on are:

  • Cloud Data Structures: Cloud Data Structures are extensions of variables and lists in Scratch 2.0, where data in Cloud Data Structures are stored online. With Cloud Data Structures, young programmers using Scratch can create projects that collect and store data online, such as surveys, games with high-score lists, etc.
  • Maps: Scratch 2.0 has experimental support for Google Maps, allowing young programmers to create interactive Scratch projects which can query and display Google maps. Example projects with maps in Scratch 2.0 include virtual tours of neighborhoods, map based visualizations such as heatmaps, etc.

How do you see that working?

  • The first part of the session would consist of us demonstrating and explaining the relevant features of Scratch 2.0, along with example projects that has been created by young programmers using these features.
  • This would be followed by participants creating their own project on the Scratch 2.0 website[1]. We will be actively facilitating and assisting the participants during their explorations.
  • The third segment of the session would be a show & tell exercise, where participants will be able to demonstrate the project that they created to the rest.
  • The session would conclude with a discussion and reflection session about the features the participants got to explore, along with brainstorming about other possible ways in which Scratch can plug in to the web.

How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?

The organization of the session will remain the same, regardless of the number of participants. There will be enough MIT Scratch Team members at the event to provide support for even a large group. We will be adjusting the length of our introduction session and the time each participant gets for the show & tell exercise based on the turnout.

How long within your session before someone else can teach this?

We expect participants of the session to be able to demonstrate and teach the relevant features of Scratch 2.0 by the end of the workshop. They will be able to teach others how to collect and store data online using Scratch 2.0, as well as how to program with maps using Scratch 2.0.

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

We expect participants to have had an exposure to the new web-centric features of Scratch 2.0 through this session. We also expect them to be able to introduce these features to others, both in the festival, and outside of the festival.

[1] The Scratch 2.0 website is under development at this moment. We expect to allow participants to access a prototype version of the website during the workshop.

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