Mitchel Resnick

Abstract

It doesn’t need to be that way. In my research group at the MIT Media Lab, we still believe in Papert’s dream of computational fluency for everyone. But we also understand that turning Papert’s dream into a reality isn’t easy. It will require a new generation of technologies, activities, and educational strategies. That’s what we’ve tried to do with Scratch (http://scratch. mit.edu), a programming language and online community that we developed to provide new pathways into programming. Scratch aims to engage everyone, of all backgrounds and interests, in creating their own interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations. Our goal is not to prepare people for careers as professional programmers but rather to enable everyone to express themselves creatively through programming. Learning lessons from Papert’s experiences of Logo, we’ve designed Scratch to move beyond Logo along three dimensions, making programming more tinkerable, more meaningful, and more social.