Tag: scratch

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Read Generative AI and Creative Learning: Concerns, Opportunities, and Choices by Mitchel Resnick
As each new wave of technology ripples through society, we need to decide if and how to integrate the technology into our learning environments. That was true with personal computers, then with the internet, and now with generative AI technologies.

I just listened to the generated audio rather than read this.

Really powerful summary between the instructionist and constructionist approaches to AI in education. Resnick is of course the father of scratch, so is firmly on the constructionist side.

There are powerful ideas and examples of the ways AI could support a constructionist approach to learning and the 4Ps projects, passion, peers, and play.

I started to pull out quotes, but it easier to suggest you just read the whole thing.

 I worry that inertia and market pressures will push the educational uses of generative AI in this direction.

This would be the worry.

The piece finishes with

The choice is up to us. The choice is more educational and political than technological. What types of learning and education do we want for our children, our schools, and our society? All of us—as teachers, parents, school administrators, designers, developers, researchers, policymakers—need to consider our values and visions for learning and education, and make choices that align with our values and visions. It is up to us.

I do wonder if, in the mainstream, we have much choice. I don’t think that many decisions about educational technology have been very pure, the power of the big companies is massive. We should be thankful that the more open, non-commercial like scratch exists.

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montage of 6 webpage screenshots: https://ecohustler.com/technology/blue-empire-the-norwegian-salmon-industry-consumes-25percent-of-all-wild-fish-caught-globally https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/curation-is-the-last-best-hope-of-intelligent-discourse https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/wmg/about/outreach/resources/turtlestitch/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3jrgYnljYI https://projects.kwon.nyc/internet-is-fun/ https://lessons.wesfryer.com/courses/coding/scratch-coding

School

Lessons by Dr. Wesley Fryer @wfryer – Scratch Coding We use Scratch a bit in class so adding this to a pile of links.

A variation on Turtle/Scratch stuff, there is some CPD coming up

Turtlestitch is freely available software that enables the generation and stitching of patterns using a digital embroidery machine. It gives programmatic control of the machine, enabling a wide range of patterns to be designed and stitched onto fabric. It was developed by Andrea Mayr-Stalder, and runs in a browser window.

Mac

TipBITS: Always Show Window Proxy Icons – TidBITS Bless TidBITS for this. I’ve been quiety grumbling for a while. As someone with poor window management I’ve alway loved proxy icons.

Internet

The role of human curators is not just to select and present content but to imbue the digital landscape with a sense of reliability and authenticity that only human insight can provide.

Curation is the last best hope of intelligent discourse. — Joan Westenberg

I’ve been meaning to write some kind of Important Thinkpiece™ on the glory days of the early internet, but every time I sit down to do it, I find another, better piece that someone else has already written. So for now, here’s a collection of articles that to some degree answer the question “Why have a personal website?” with “Because it’s fun, and the internet used to be fun.”

The internet used to be fun

Nature

Blue Empire: the Norwegian salmon industry consumes 2.5% of all wild fish caught globally | Ecohustler I avoid Salmon due to the sea lice and the effect on wild stocks here.

Music

Jumping right into the middle:

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Liked: Scratch is a big deal | Bryan Braun – Frontend Developer

Interesting take on Scratch by a Developer & parent.

This recent growth has caused Scratch to break into the Tiobe index’s top 20 most popular programming languages. At the time of this post (July 2022) it ranks 21st, above Typescript, Rust, Julia, and other important languages. The Tiobe index is imperfect but there’s clearly something happening here.

Bryan points to some

It’s pretty impressive how ambitious the projects get. Scratchers often build copycats of “real” games like Cut the Rope, Super Mario Bros, and Terraria. Features like cloud variables allow them to make online multiplayer games, like Taco Burp (popular in my house)

This is quite a different degree of scratching than I’ve seen in my and other classroom recently.

The REST APIs enable third-party tooling like Turbowarp—a parallel site that can run Scratch projects 20x faster.

 

A bit clicking leads to Paper Minecraft v11.6 (Minecraft 2D) on Scratch!

A lot of food for thought, I never spend much time with scratch beyond preparing and experimenting with the most basic of things. I am not sure it is a rabbit hope I want to peer down for long. I think the simple types of things we do in class are enough for most of the pupils (along with micro:bits, lego and other coding). The advanced projects might be useful to point some of the more confident pupils at.

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Screenshot of AgentScratch

AgentScratch | Anaylse Your Scratch Project

Agent Scratch is designed to assess children’s learning of CT skills from the Computational concepts perspective, which can also be defined as the programming constructs. This includes; sequences, loops, events, parallelism, conditionals, operators, variables and abstraction.

This looks really interesting. Pupils can upload a scratch files to do some assessment and analyse what concepts they have used. I’ll be interested to try this out.

I did notice that testing it with the recent COP 26 code along project (from @digilearnscot and @CodeClubScot) that most of the boxes were ticked. Although my class all used the techniques, I don’t think they have got them all yet. I’ll be interested to see how it goes. You can Select the specific programming constructs you would like to include in your analysis I suspect it might be best to dip our toes in one concept at a time.

I did my testing from an iPad, downloading the .sb3 files and then uploading to be analysed worked very well.

There are some Badges, not digital ones, that would be useful for e-Portfolios, or printing and making badges with.

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Liked https://twitter.com/cemocreates/status/1305699520567635968 by Celeste (twitter.com)

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Liked A tweet by Celeste (twitter.com)
Here's my #AnimateYourWorld exploration using the #VideoSensing blocks in @scratch. I wanted to bring my books to life! The blue square recognizes what book I'm reading (based on color of the cover) and populates my screen with some interactive characters. #ComputationalTinkering

This is amazing.

Interactive Storybook Animations Using Video Sensing on Scratch

I made a quick test:

Continue reading →

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Scratch is now at version 3.0. I’ve been looking forward to this as it will now support the iPads my class uses.

I gave it half an hour or so on my iPad and am delighted to say that it does what is says on the tin. The iPad I am using is an Air 1 so a good few years old. It was a little laggy now and again but nothing that I worried about.

I was especially delighted to see that old scratch embeds still word and now work on iOS too the Scratch Embed example on Glow Blog Help just worked.

I also tried exporting a Pyonkee project and then importing it into scratch 3 on the iPad that worked too. Pyonkee is an iOS app that is based on scratch 1.4 that my class have been using.

I look forward to introducing the class to scratch on iOS in the new term.

Here are a couple of useful links:

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Liked Eric Schilling on Twitter (Twitter)
“Tinkering with realtime world creation in @Scratch. Character on the screen is coded to interact with different colored objects. (Black is floor. Red is lava. Green is the goal.) Kids can be creating and coding these worlds simultaneously in realtime. https://t.co/giiR6HCmNR”

I want to track this to see if the “how to” requests get an answer. Looks clever. Might not need much kit?

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Scratchscreen

I run a couple of after school clubs at Sandaig, today was the primary 7 computer club. The number are limited to 12 so that we don’t have to worry about resources and help. I usually have a lovely time. The primary sevens are working on Scratch. After one of the children’s nice flash movies produced last session I was tempted to stick with Flash, but Scratch is getting a lot of coverage so I though I’d try it.

We started exploring the scratch files on the projects page and watching one of the Scratch Videos. The next week the children worked through the Getting Started pdf. We missed the week after as I was at the Scottish Learning Festival and this week the children started on the Scratch cards. They are beginning to get comfortable with the interface and are having a ton of fun. It is lovely watching them find things out for themselves, some quickly found the record sound facility and gales of laughter echoed round the school. Some children quickly wanted to leave the introductory cards and explore ideas for themselves. Quite often these ideas seem pretty advanced and are leading up blind avenues but usually making interesting discoveries along the way. The children worked in pairs and sometimes one group has a solution the others need. I’ve not really explored scratch at all by myself, the children know this which hopefully will give them s sense of pride. I do have enough basic programming concepts to be able to give some help.
I a not sure if the children will be able to progress to the levels of some Scratchers (see for example munkeeb’s Stuff) in the time available, but I am sure they will have fun. I wonder how they would get on if they had an hour or two a day working with this stuff for a couple of weeks, could that work with the curriculum for excellence?