Learning through Play: Insights from the Scratch Philosophy Workshop
In February 2023, the Scratch Foundation invited Smart Cheli and 11 other organizations from five countries to a two-day Scratch Learning Philosophy workshop in Bangalore, India. The workshop focused on the 4Ps of creative learning: Projects, Peers, Passion, and Play. Scratch team members facilitated hands-on, creative coding sessions with Makey Makey, Microbit, and Scratch, encouraging participants to learn and collaborate. It was a unique and enriching experience where attendees explored their creativity, authenticity, and imagination.
The workshop kicked off with fun introductions, where participants shared something interesting about their names. It was followed by a series of activities designed to encourage creativity and collaboration, including a fun drawing exercise where participants folded a piece of paper into three parts and drew according to the instruction in each section to eventually make a person. This activity was a great way to illustrate how having creativity as an explicit learning outcome can lead to spaces where learners identify and use their strengths to accomplish astonishing things.
The workshop also emphasized the importance of sustainable practices, such as considering local weather conditions and using renewable energy sources, to build resilient homes and communities that thrive in harmony with nature. Elaine Atherton, the Director of the Scratch Foundation, narrated a remixed sustainable version of the ‘Three Little Pigs’ story, which asked participants to consider trade-offs when building a strong and sustainable house in their local environment. The story subverts the traditional narrative where the wolf is the villain. Instead, the wolf suggests good things for the pigs and the planet Earth, asking the pigs to consider trade-offs while building a strong and sustainable house that is also environmentally friendly.
Following the story, participants were given a prompt and a lot of fun materials like Legos, papers, and tapes to build a sustainable version of a building that would thrive in its local weather conditions. Some came up with rooftop gardens and solar panels, while others came up with rainwater harvesting. It was amazing to see the environmental challenges of different places apart from ours, and brainstorming a sustainable, renewable, inclusive, and innovative building was equally fun.
The second day of the workshop began with a warm-up where participants were given 30 circles on a piece of paper and asked to turn this into something new. Some in our team made a peace symbol and all kinds of planets, flowers, and clocks. Other groups made different kinds of faces. This activity was a gentle reminder that creativity is within all of us, and it is how different people approach the same problem from different perspectives.
Elaine Atherton, Director of the Scratch Foundation, then took us through the Scratch Foundation’s perception of hackathons, which is rooted in the dimensions of projects, passion, peers, play, and purpose. She emphasized the importance of looking at hackathons as opportunities to create projects we care about, take risks, collaborate, experiment with our design, remix projects, appreciate each other’s ideas, and collaboratively solve problems rather than focusing on just winning or losing. She stressed the importance of problem-solving with a purpose and making it relevant.
During the hackathon, we created different Scratch projects. Some of us used Makey Makey, while others used Microbits. One of our projects included a sensor device for visually impaired people to travel without their sticks. Other interesting projects, like a gender-bias detector and an automatic plant watering system, were also created during the hackathon.
One of the biggest takeaways from the workshop was that creative thinking could lead to innovative solutions, no matter how big or small the problem is. Whether trying to make a pattern out of a dozen circles or building your own sustainable home, you can still be creative. Being a creative thinker doesn’t have to mean securing first place in a hackathon; it means changing the hackathon into a space that doesn’t feel competitive but feels like running a marathon for a cause, where we encourage and lift each other while achieving something for the public good.
The workshop ended with a realization that if creativity is an explicit outcome for learning, collaboration and communication emerge effortlessly, smashing the power dynamics between a facilitator — director/teacher, and an actor/learner or even among the learners.
Smart Cheli is grateful to the Scratch Foundation and team for facilitating this creative and collaborative learning space. It was unique and allowed for exploration, intense deliberation, and expression of the self and our communities. In most instances, we lost track of time (being so involved) trying to get to where our compass pointed. Above all, we appreciate the opportunity to figure out and draw our creative maps rather than being asked to follow an existing one.
