Scratch 2.0: Cultivating Creativity and Collaboration in the Cloud

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the Web. Scratch is designed to enhance the technological fluency of young people, helping them learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, and they gain a deeper understanding of the process of design.

Research is divided into two strands:

(1) Technological infrastructure for creative collaboration. With Scratch 2.0, people will be able to design and program new types of web-based interactions and services. For example, they will be able to program interactions with social-media websites (such as Facebook), create visualizations with online data, and program their own collaborative applications.

(2) Design experiments for creative collaboration. As the team develops Scratch 2.0, they will run online experiments to study how their design decisions influence the ways in which people collaborate on creative projects, as well as their attitudes towards collaboration.

In developing Scratch 2.0, the team will focus on two questions from the NSF Program Solicitation:
(*) Will the research lead to the development of new technologies to support human creativity?
(*) Will the research lead to innovative educational approaches in computer science, science, or engineering that reward creativity?

Intellectual Merit. The intellectual merit of the project is based on its study of how new technologies can foster creativity and collaboration. The investigators will conduct design experiments to examine how new features of Scratch 2.0 engage young people in new forms of creative expression, collaboration, learning, and metadesign. Young people are already interacting with many cloud-based services (such as YouTube and Facebook). But Scratch 2.0 is fundamentally different in that it aims to engage people in programming their own projects and activities in the cloud. With Scratch 2.0, young people won?t just interact with the cloud, they will create in the cloud. The goal is to democratize the development of cloud-based activities, so that everyone can become an active contributor to the cloud, not just a consumer of cloud-based services. This development and study of Scratch 2.0 will lead to new insights into strategies for engaging young people in activities that cultivate collaboration and creativity.

Broader Impacts. The broader impact of the project is based on its ability to broaden participation in programming and computer science. The current version of Scratch has already helped attract a broader diversity of students to computer science compared to other programming platforms. The investigators expect that the collaboration and social-media features of Scratch 2.0 will resonate with the interests of today's youth and further broaden participation. Integration of Scratch into the introductory computer science course at Harvard led to a sharp reduction in the number of students dropping the course, and an increase in the retention of female students. There have been similar results in pre-college courses. The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) calls Scratch a ?promising practice? for increasing gender diversity in IT.