Scratch it

After reading the article about Scratch and exploring the Scratch website, what are some observable benefits in creating a space to share student work?


After reading the article Scratch and learning about Scratch, there are a lot observable benefits in creating a space to share student work. Scratch is a way of programming for kids and younger adults. The article says that, "'Digital fluency' should mean designing, creating, and remixing, not just browsing, chatting, and interacting." And that's what Scratch does. Scratch's primary goal is "to nurture a new generation of creative, systematic thinkers comfortable using programming to express their ideas." Scratch greatly expands the scale of what you can create, how you can express yourself, all with the computer. "It also expands the range of what you can learn." Programming involves "the creation of external representations of your problem-solving processes, programming provides you with opportunities to reflect on your own thinking, even to think about thinking itself." Scratch is designed to be highly interactive. The article states that a blog post from a computer scientist who introduced Scratch to his two children said: "One of the nicest things I saw with Scratch was that it personalized the development experience in new ways by making it easy for my kids to add personalized content and actively participate in the development process. Not only could they develop abstract programs to do mindless things with a cat or a box, etc… but they could add their own pictures and their own voices to the Scratch environment, which has given them hours of fun and driven them to learn." Scratch knows what kids like and knows how to make their environment fun. They get the learning done with fun and are very successful.

The large number of projects on the Scratch serves as inspiration as well to the consumers. Scratchers are able to get ideas for new projects and learn new programming techniques. "The site is also fertile ground for collaboration. Community members are constantly borrowing, adapting, and building on one another’s ideas, images, and programs. Over 15% of the projects there are remixes of other projects on the site."

Scratch just has so many benefits to share student work, because they can all inspire and motivate each other through the site. They can collaborate, have fun and learn at the same time. Scratch is very successful is what it accomplishes for young adults and kids.