Scratching the Surface
Last week, Artist-Educators at Progressive Arts Alliance enjoyed the opportunity for a full day training session on Scratch with Eric, the Scratch Online Community Manager. So, what exactly is Scratch, you ask?
Created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is a visual programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and then share your creations on the web. It’s a programming environment and online community where kids create, share and remix animations, stories, interactive art and video games.
Scratch opens the doors wide for collaboration opportunity. As a visual artist myself, specifically a printmaker, I was amazed at how intuitive Scratch was for drag-and-drop visual programming. Only an hour into the training, and I was buzzing along on an animation project pretty comfortably. It’s a color-coded block-building approach to writing code. The user simply builds — similar to Legos — and locks together various movements and sounds. And Scratch is all about sharing. Once you publish your piece on Scratch, anyone can learn from what you built, and can borrow, or build upon it themselves for a remix — the code is always available, and public. Check out our studio of Scratch projects our team made during our training by clicking here.
We also adventured into Scratch Jr, which is the younger version of Scratch, and available as a free application for iPad. Here is a screenshot of a quick animation that I created on that platform:
After only a handful of hours learning about the software, my mind was abuzz with possibilities for classroom collaborations and residencies that could draw on the overlap of art forms. I can envision a printmaking residency that creates the backgrounds and various characters that could easily be imported into Scratch to lend for some gorgeous animations or games. What a rich opportunity to create media at every level (both physically and digitally) completely authored by students, and then shared — and I’ve just begun to scratch the surface of possibilities.
