Hughesville, PA – Technology writer Michael Badger recently presented “Programming for the Young and the Young at Heart” at regional technology conferences in Pennsylvania and Ohio. In his talk, Michael demonstrated the Scratch programming language to a diverse audience of teachers, parents, and users.
The seventh annual Ohio LinuxFest was held in Columbus, OH on September 25 – 27, 2009. The second annual Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference was held in Harrisburg, PA on October 17, 2009.Both conferences featured talks, tutorials, and exhibits in support of open source software and community-based software.
Scratch is a computer programming language that enables kids as young as eight years old to create games, interactive stories, animated art, and multimedia projects by stacking color-coded blocks together. Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. See scratch.mit.edu.
In his talk Michael promoted Scratch as a tool to help increase the digital literacy of students because the environment encourages creative thinking, problem solving, and programming. He demonstrated some simple programming concepts using Scratch and showcased Scratch’s ability to connect to external devices, including webcams and sensor boards.
The external devices allow students to inject real-world events and stimuli into their Scratch projects. For example the webcam easily imports photo snapshots, and the sensor board captures sound, light, button clicks, slider position, and electrical resistance.
Michael is the author of the book Scratch 1.4 Beginner’s Guide from Packt Publishing, a comprehensive Scratch programming tutorial for teachers and parents.
