Scratch Week: Celebrating remix culture off of the Scratch Editor
By Valerie I
It’s time for Scratch Week again! This year we’re celebrating 15 years of avant-garde creations, fanciful inventions, and the compassionate people that help make Scratch a fun and safe place to imagine, create, and share.
But before we dig into this year’s festivities, let’s look back at how a single conference at MIT’s Media Lab inspired a global wave of satellite events that have helped us unify and redefine community.
From the Media Lab and Beyond
Scratch Day, which we now know as Scratch Week, has evolved in a similar way as projects shared in the Scratch Editor. The Scratch Team had a particular vision for how our community could celebrate and collaborate, but that vision, like the projects created by Scratchers, has since been remixed and transformed in more extraordinary ways than we could have imagined.
Since Scratch’s conception, remix culture has been crucial in helping Scratchers learn and experiment with coding creatively and collaboratively. We’ve found that remixing gives users the inspiration, autonomy, confidence, and tools they need — adapting pieces from one project and creating something that feels authentic to them.
We’ve found this same concept true for events that live outside of the Scratch Editor. Historically, Scratchers have been more excited to engage in events they feel are accessible to them. As we’ve grown, our team has committed to discovering and developing new ways to support our global community members in hosting their own Scratch Week events that feel meaningful to their local communities and respective cultures.
Saskia Leggett is the former Outreach Manager at Scratch and a key thought leader for planning and executing some of the earliest Scratch Day celebrations at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch Day events originated in 2009 when Harvard Professor Karen Brennan engineered our first in-person interactive meeting spaces for Scratchers, educators, and families in response to feedback from the Scratch Community. These events established the blueprint for the celebrations that followed.
Leggett describes her role in planning Scratch Day events as “magical,” with closets morphed into caves and vibrant decorations adorning the walls. Yet despite the magic, she says, there was one lingering question that seemed to riddle the team every year, and that was:
“How do we take the celebration on the sixth floor of the Media Lab and make it accessible for everyone?”
As one solution, Leggett and the team toyed with decentralizing staff to remix the large event into mini Scratch Day events throughout Massachusetts. While this solution reached a broader audience, they realized that it still did not feel as inclusive of our global Scratch community. Leggett says this collective brainstorming reinforced that the focus of the celebration should be more about people and less about the space.
“Ultimately, the magic of the day is the youth coming together and their families seeing what they’ve created for the first time. That was the original idea of Scratch Day, for families and communities to come together to see what Scratch is, to create projects together, to laugh together,” she says.
“It’s not about how flashy the decorations are, but how meaningful the connections are.”
That following year, Leggett and the team developed a toolkit of resources, including a series of blogs, to encourage others to remix their own Scratch Day celebrations. She says, “we just wanted to make as many resources and opportunities for others to make Scratch Day events in their communities in the way that made sense for their spaces, values, and capacities.” Some of these resources included: How do you design Scratch Day activities? and 10 tips for hosting Scratch Day .
Our community has since hosted thousands of remixed Scratch Celebrations around the world!
Remixing Around the World!
Houston, Texas
In Houston, Texas, Rosa Aristy and her team at Bridges to Science hosted their first Scratch Week celebration in 2021 with a virtual Scratch Fiesta equipped with music, piñatas, and more. Aristy says that it’s essential that all students see themselves represented in the activities they plan for Scratch Week.
For Aristy and her students, Scratch Week is a time to create, celebrate, explore, imagine, and bond as a community. “I now think of it as a fiesta, where not everything needs to be perfect to be festive, beautiful, and memorable,” she says.
“I asked our students what they liked and disliked about our in-person gatherings…A student quickly jumped to say, ‘I only think they need to be longer.’ I agree: creative learning as a community needs to be not just a few hours’ event, but a lifelong pursuit!”
Tokyo, Japan
In Tokyo, Japan, our friends at Otomo have been celebrating Scratch Day since we hosted our inaugural celebration in 2009! Daisuke Kuramoto is an educator at Otomo; he describes their Scratch Week celebrations as a “nest of new ideas” where Scratchers can meet in a central place to discuss shared passions both in-person and online.
One year, they held a “mokumoku room” as part of their festivities. Kuramoto describes this room as a working space where students could voluntarily participate in rotations to share ideas and engage in dialogue.
Through the years, events have grown to include as many as 800 attendees. This year Daisuke plans to participate by joining our virtual online Scratch Celebration.
Memphis, Tennessee
In Memphis, Tennessee, Darius James and his team at Code Crew use Scratch Week as an opportunity to connect K-12 students and their families through coding. This year, their team plans to host a Family Code Night for the Greater Memphis Area as part of their Scratch Week celebration. They also are planning to celebrate Scratch Week during their virtual Hour of Code event.
James says that these events are planned with a focus primarily on introducing more students and their families to Scratch and exposing them to creative coding.
“The demographics of the children that our organization reaches are youth whose demographics are underrepresented in tech,” he says. “Therefore, we have centered our Scratch projects around culture and self-expression so that students could see coding as another avenue of self-expression.”
All Around the World!
When the pandemic struck in 2020, we knew we wanted to preserve the creative spirit and energy of Scratch Day, even when we couldn’t gather together in person. We reimagined our annual event as a global, virtual celebration where thousands of Scratchers around the world connected and created with each other as they participated in our daily themed studios. We quickly realized that the virtual Scratch Week celebration was more than a pandemic stopgap; it was also an exciting way to remix the annual gathering into something even more accessible and welcoming to kids, families, and educators everywhere.
An Ever-Evolving Celebration
Now removed from her role as an Outreach Manager, Leggett marvels at the evolution of Scratch Week and the ways that communities have and continue to remix their events to empower, educate, connect, and redefine the meaning of community.
“We had a really specific formula for how to build and bring the community together when I started organizing Scratch Day, but…the point is to figure out the way for you to have your students not just make things, but share them,” she says. “It’s not just about coding, but it’s about creating with others that matters.”
This year, we invite you to celebrate Scratch Week with us your way! Use #ScratchWeek on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to show us how you are celebrating in your community. We also invite you to join us for our virtual Scratch Week celebration. Register here!
