Technology Volunteers at the
Scratch@MIT 2014 Conference
Matthew Healey, Thomas Preece, Arteesha Bosamia
and Margaret Low
September 1, 2014
Technology Volunteers is a Warwick Volunteers Project at the University of Warwick Contents
1. Introduction 2. Pre Conference Activities 3. Conference Activities 3.1 Workshop: Sensing Me 3.2 Poster Session: Controlling Our World 3.3 Ignite Presentation: What we learnt whilst teaching Scratch 4. Outcomes & Future Activities 5. Conclusion 6. Acknowledgements Appendix 1 ­ Links to Other Media 1. Introduction
The Technology Volunteers team attended the Scratch@MIT Conference in August 2014 at the MIT media lab in Cambridge, Boston, USA. We had submitted three proposals to the conference and we were delighted when the proposals were accepted. The funding we received enabled us to deliver these sessions at the conference. Our aim was to share our ideas and resources with conference participants and to encourage participants to use them in their own organisations and workshops. The conference was also a valuable opportunity to experience the different ways that people from around the world are using Scratch creatively in education. We hoped to incorporate some of these ideas into our current workshops that we deliver to local schools in the Coventry and Warwickshire area, and at events we are invited to. The Technology Volunteers had run workshops and given presentations at the previous Scratch MIT 2012 conference and the Scratch European conference in 2013, so this was an opportunity to review established connections and build new connections with people within the international Scratch community. We also wanted to continue to develop our collaboration with Susan Ettenheim who was also attending the conference. Susan is an animation teacher from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York, who we have collaborated with several times in the past and the conference was a perfect place to continue this collaboration. 2. Pre Conference Activities
The proposals accepted for the conference were ● a workshop session “Sensing Me!”, ● a poster presentation “Controlling Our World”, ● and an ignite presentation “What We Learned Whilst Teaching Scratch”. These proposals were based on ideas that had arisen from Technology Volunteers teaching activities, however, they all needed further development and refinement before being presented at the Scratch conference. An important part of the pre conference activity involved applying for and raising sufficient funding to enable the three project leaders to attend the conference. Once funding was in place, flights purchased and accommodation organised, we then were able to concentrate on the development of the session resources and gathering the materials needed to support them. For the workshop each member of the team produced a new way to incorporate Scratch and sensors to sense something in a similar way to that of the human body. We produced several worksheets for each sensor that gave a description of how to build the sensor and how to use the sensors. These worksheets also included the Scratch programs that were demonstrated at the workshop. Its really useful having worksheets that can be downloaded directly from the web as they enable people at the conference to use our ideas in their teaching, and share them with colleagues, effectively extending the impact of our activities. The poster presentation was based around the development of some software to enable the Arduino, a standard microprocessor board to act as a Scratch sensor board. The application took some time to design and implement. Subsequently it has been released as open source software after launching it at the conference. Even after the application was finished it required many hours of testing and refinement. Once software development was complete, 6 worksheets were created as resources to show users how to use the software as well as introducing them to electronics and Arduino. For the ignite presentation the preparation required us to produce a 5 minute presentation of 20 slides, each slide advancing automatically every 15 seconds. The time constraints meant it was challenging to fit in everything we wanted to say. A number of rehearsals were arranged to ensure we were able to include the key messages and did not waste time stumbling on words. 3. Conference Activities
3.1 Workshop: Sensing Me
Our first session at the Scratch Conference was a workshop entitled 'Sensing Me'. The purpose of the session was to firstly teach the participants how to use a picoboard with Scratch and hence allow them to sense light, sound, button presses and motion from the slider in their programs. The second purpose was to show off how they can use kitchen sink materials (materials that may be lying around the house and eventually end up in the rubbish bin) to create a variety of new sensors that can then be used with the picoboard and Scratch. The aim was that the participants would go back home and try these activities with their students allowing the students to understand how many of the gadgets they use in modern life work but also to encourage them to create their own interfaces. We entitled the session 'Sensing Me' as the we wanted to show off our newly created sensors that sensed something about the human body, be this measuring breath, showing how the lens in our eye works or even how our eyes detect colour. We also demonstrated all the sensors that we had previously made such as a bottle that measures tilt, bottle top drums and our paper slider. As well as showing off our new and old sensors we also provided website links and paper copies of resources that allow the participants to recreate and use the sensors.
Our workshop turned out to be extremely popular with all the seats of our room being filled as well as some people standing at the back. The presentation went down very well with the audience very engaged throughout and they also really enjoyed trying the sensors themselves. We quickly ran out of paper copies of our resources and we have had many people visiting our resources web page since we delivered the session. The workshop pictures show that the audience really liked our ideas. We also proved very popular on Twitter with tweets such as those below appearing on our Twitter feed. 3.2 Poster Session: Controlling Our World
Our second session was a poster presentation entitled 'Controlling Our World'. The purpose of this session was to promote a free and open source program called SuperEasy­A4S designed and produced by Thomas Preece, one of our project leaders. The program was designed to be really easy to use and enable people to use an Arduino with Scratch. An Arduino is a little microprocessor that can be used to control outputs such as motors and lights and read inputs such as the sensors we showed off in our 'Sensing Me' session, by linking it to Scratch we can control outputs in Scratch and use inputs much like we do with the picoboard. The second purpose of the session was to promote the resources we had made that detail how to use the software as well as providing several worksheets that gently guide readers through using Arduino and the electronics behind each project. The overall aim of the session was to inform as many people as possible about the software and get the participants and their students using outputs and sensors with Scratch using an Arduino. Again our resources proved to be very popular with our stall being populated with people throughout the entire of the session and we also noticed participants using the resources later on in the conference during the lunch breaks. Responses from Twitter users were very positive with tweets such as these examples appearing on our Twitter feed and being retweeted many times. The session was also very useful for Thomas as it gave him feedback on the software and allowed him to improve it and produce a version for Mac. Since then Thomas has received emails from people thanking him for the software. Including an email from a teacher in Australia whose school is now using it in their education and school holiday programs. His software has also been mentioned on several websites in various languages. 3.3 Ignite Presentation: What We Learnt Whilst Teaching Scratch
Our last session at the Scratch Conference was an ignite presentation entitled 'What We Learnt Whilst Teaching Scratch'. An Ignite presentation is a fast 5 minute presentation where each slide moves on automatically after 15 seconds. In our typical style we decided to do the presentation whilst having a live demonstration going on at the same time. This time we decided to live code two different programs in Scratch whilst also delivering a presentation on our experiences and what we have learnt whilst teaching Scratch. Our key messages in the presentation was that there are multiple ways to solve a problem and that creative thinking leads to different solutions. Through our time leading sessions at the schools, we have noticed that many children would just reproduce the Scratch program in the exact same way as shown in the demonstration. We felt that it is important to push the children to do it their own way by being creative and not just to reproduce what we have shown them. We have also seen that when asking children how they would do something in a particular example, and what blocks they could use, they all give different answers, which are all correct ways of doing the same task. During the presentation we had two different teams of people live programming in Scratch during the presentation and we had tasked them to create a baseball game using only selected Scratch blocks. This led the two different teams to go at the problem in different ways but both produced the same end result, further showing the message that we were discussing in our presentation. The presentation was in the main keynote room and had quite a large amount of people in when we delivered our presentation. The presentation seems to go down well and the audience seemed to like it and like the message we gave. Again we got rather favourable tweets as shown below. 4. Outcomes & Future Activities
The statistics on the resources website shows the immediate impact of our workshop at the conference. One key outcome of this visit is that we have strengthened our collaboration with Susan Ettenheim and also explored other potential collaborative projects. She is very interested in us continuing our collaboration whether that is done via another visit to New York or a place we are both travel to, or whether we explore using an online video chat program. She is very keen to continue the collaboration with her classes at Eleanor Roosevelt High School again with us bringing in some of our school classes into the collaboration activities. As a result of the visit to Scratch 2014, based on the new resources, we submitted a workshop proposal for the International Mozilla Festival 2014 in London, 24th ­ 26th of October. We have just received notification that our proposal has been accepted (out of many submissions) and we are very excited to be presenting there soon. The new sensor and workshop resources we have created will now be integrated with our existing resources. Firstly it will be used to train this years Technology Volunteers and then used in our Scratch sessions at local schools as well as in our other sessions in the local area such as at the BBC Open Centre. We also made several useful contacts while at the conference that may be able to help us in future sessions. We met Stephen Howell, the creator of the Kinect 4 Scratch extension that allows the Kinect to be used in Scratch, and uses body movements to do things in Scratch. Although we have not done any workshops before with the Kinect we have looked at the idea, especially as we have a Kinect available to us. 5. Conclusion
In conclusion this has been a very successful venture. The outreach activities of the Technology Volunteers, and hence the University of Warwick, have been shared with an international audience. The worksheet resources we’ve produced have also been shared with that audience, and the wider community, as can be seen by the website report. The three sessions that we delivered at the conference were all well attended. Spaces for the workshop were fully booked within 48 hours of the booking system going live. Our sessions received good feedback and after the sessions, often conference attendees came back to continue discussions with ideas that arose from the sessions. There is also potential for future collaborations, as the Technology Volunteers are now well known in the Scratch Community. The worksheet resources that have been developed for the conference will now be used firstly to train the 2014­15 volunteers, and then with local schools and events. The conference experience was valuable to each of the project leaders, giving an opportunity to show abilities like team working, meeting project deadlines, working under pressure and presentation skills. Thomas said ­ “I really enjoyed the experience and not only did it help me to improve my confidence and public speaking abilities but it also allowed me to get valuable feedback on my software allowing me to update it to make it accessible to many more people. It also helped me to improve my organisation skills as the sessions were assigned very close together in time so organisation was key to the smooth running of them.” Arteesha said ­ “This trip was a really great opportunity for us to take our ideas and share them with educational experts. I really enjoyed my time at Boston; the conference environment, networking with people and seeing everyones ideas. I am really looking forward to going back to the next conference and hopefully going to other Scratch events to.” Matthew said ­ “The experience gave me an insight into computer science education outside of the UK and how I could continue to contribute to the scratch community after my time at Warwick. In particular, it elucidated the knowledge gap that teachers have and why it is necessary that scratch like programming languages exist to bridge the gap so that educators are prepared to teach an IT literate generation.” Through this trip we have reached our aims and completed our tasks successfully. We have reached out to many teachers and industry experts through the activities and have promoted ourselves and our resources through social media. Our workshop was successful and we received encouraging feedback. Through this trip we have created new links and we hope to continue supporting these established links in the future and look forward to bringing the Technology Volunteers to the next Scratch conference and other opportunities where we can promote the work of Technology Volunteers and learn from others as well. Technology Volunteers with Professor Mitch Resnick 6. Acknowledgements
Thank you to the following people and organisations who with their help and support made this project possible. ● Opportunity Fund ● Warwick SU Project Fund ● VC’s Fund ● IAS ● Faculty of Science ● The Computer Science Department, Mathematics Department and Physics Department at the University of Warwick ● British Computer Society (Coventry) and Computing At School. Appendix 1 - Links to Other Media
Our Ignite Presentation Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOkt7SFu0eU Our Media Page http://go.warwick.ac.uk/TechVolunteers/resources/2013­14/ Our Twitter Details @TechVolunteers #ScratchMIT2014 Our Facebook Details https://www.facebook.com/TechnologyVolunteers Scratch 2014 Conference Program http://scratch.mit.edu/conference/ Giving to Warwick Opportunity Fund Opportunity Fund bursaries are funded by the generous donations of Warwick alumni and friends. For more information see: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/giving/priority/scholarship/oppfund/