Scratch

big-bang wrote:

scratchcritic564 wrote:

big-bang wrote:

I agree. Sword fighting games? Those are... unrealistic... and lego.com tries to be appropriate. And (random) example: Goomba stomping - try doing that, you'll pull a leg muscle. Sometimes, "Cartoon Violence" is to keep people from really doing violence. But games without blood are scary to - one of the Resident Evil designers says that he makes gory games because otherwise, a guy getting sliced in half and not bleeding could lead to a misconception that doing an unspeakable act will not cause much pain. There's no perfect way out, unfortunately.

I agree. no offesnse, rico, but you obviously have problems, if you have to ban a site because of a few games with cartoon violence. as i've noticed, adults are always overprotective when it comes to violence. seriously, Super Smash Bros. Brawl is very non-violent, but somehow it got rated teen. and on scratch, blood is basicly nothing more than red stuff created in the paint editor.

I was wondering about Brawl. I was about to get it, but then I noticed the rating. I guess it's just the fighting itself, but still... good luck trying to pull a Final Smash on a jerk who shoves you over a fence.

ratings are just guidelines. Everything depends on you. I could read at 3 years, everyone in my school started at 6. I was allowed to play runescape, they were too. I'm not allowed to play gory games (or was it I don't like to I can't remember) but some people in my grade are.

If you have written a project that is a little to intense for a web site that needs to be elementary school friendly. I am building a scratch arcade.

The arcade site has a contact page, so if you are looking to get an audience for something that was too intense (although I have my limits too) drop me a line

http://2brosarcade.twobrotherssoftware.com

andresmh wrote:

With more than 1,000 projects a day

once 1.4 is out that number will grow about 1000 a day. Which means on the first day of 1.4 there will be about 4678 more projects.

Comcastc99 wrote:

For those of you reading this, I believe that you are familiar with my project, the Naruto Christmas Special, which I must say is a project that I myself am ashamed to be associated with.  I am not a violent person by nature, and although I must say that some p[projects are certainly too violent to be published, I believe that people should recognize the freedom of others to express themselves.  Violence, while not a good thing, can neither be completely banned, nor totally erased from Scratch.  While I do intend to remove several of my projects, I must say that blocking projects on the basis of them being too violent is just as bad as banning projects becuase they aren't violent enough.  While I am, as I said, going to remove projects of mine that are too violent, it is up to the users of Scratch to maintain some level of control over the projects that they do or do not view.  Someone who is opposed to violence SHOULD NOT view a violent project, and then complain.  Forming a regime in which only projects that are devoid of any sort of violence are permissible can not end positively.  As such, I believe that, while Scratch projects should not exhibit use of drugs or alcohol, language, racial slurs, or extreme violence, I also believe that users should have some area in which they can design a project.
In conclusion, I must say that users cannot be judged on the content of their projects, and that policing he Scratch network to erase violent projects will accomplish nothing, and as such will be a useless endeavor.  Scratch was made on the basis of "Imagine-Program-Share", and it is not up to others what I, or any other Scratch user can imagine.

That is true but I think a scratcher can be way more aware of the kind of content they post on the scratch website. Scratch is a place that aims towards kids and sometimes violence (even if expressing yourself) is not to belong in a community like this.

andresmh wrote:

rico, you can certainly use Scratch without using the website. You could also configure your network to disable access to a particular page (the Chinese government does it all the time    ) 

With more than 1,000 projects a day, our best solution so far to deal with inappropriate content is to is to have combination of decentralized monitoring and centralized decision making. We do rely on the community to help us monitor the site and I believe this is not only a pragmatic solution but it also helps young people engage in thinking about their own moral reasoning as we ask them to explain why a project is inappropriate when they flag it.  I  would love to see more in depth discussions about these issues as there is never a right or wrong answer.

When people flag projects as inappropriate there are two things that could happen:

1. If the project receives one or just a few flags, the Scratch Team reviews the project and makes one of the following decisions:
a) censors the project, this sends a notification to the creator asking him or her not to post that kind of project
b) marks it as "for everyone" when we think it's something we would show to any person. For example, an animation of a ball or a scientific simulation.
c) marks it as "not for everyone" when the project show mild violence, are OK in the cultural context of the US media, but that we would rather not emphasize. Projects like this cannot make it to  the front page.

2. If certain content is flagged by many people it is automatically censored. Then the Scratch Team reviews it and makes a decision (see #1). This is useful because we don't have the resources to be checking the site 24 hrs a day and it has been successful mechanism at removing pornography and other kind of very inappropriate content very quickly. Unfortunately, this system is also abused by some members who sometimes organize with others to take down projects as a way to annoy their creator. That's why we always review community-censored project and sometimes un-censor them if they doesn't deserve to be censored. We also block accounts when people are abusing the flagging system.


In the future we would like to implement a filter that only shows projects marked as "for everyone", however we have not had the time or resources to do it and it also might be disappointing to browse such site because the percentage of projects that we can actually review is so small that it would be more of a place with an extended set of sample projects rather than an active sharing place.

At some point we spent some time implementing a solution for schools to have a shared and controlled environment in our site but unfortunately after talking to some teachers we realized that it was not a good solution. First, because there was not concensus on whether or not a shared spaces for all schools was something people would be interested in using. Second because teachers are already too busy with their work to be able to do spend time reviewing projects. Third, the rules in each school in each country are very different. Fourth, we would not be able to have the time and resources necessary to verify that the people joining such system were indeed schools and teachers.

In the particular project you point out, the Scratch Team decided to mark it as "not for everyone". It is very complicated to decide where the line is crossed. Each person and each culture has very different values. In general, it seems to me that people US are more concerned about sexual content while in Europe people tend to be more sensitive towards violence. I imagine in the Middle East and Asia the concerns could be different. 

One interesting data point is that there doesn't seem to be any concensus on whether or not violence in video games causes violent behavior. In fact, there is this report recently from the Harvard School of Public Health that claims that violence in video games does not not seem to be linked to real violence. I like the note ends by saying "Kutner and Olson have documented their findings in Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games, where they stress the importance of parental education and awareness. In a society where children who don't play games are considered to be socially inept, it is important for parents to understand what their kids are playing. In addition, they need to be able to block out the seemingly endless attacks on the video game industry and use the scientific evidence available to make judgments for themselves and their family."

I would like to think engaging the Scratch community in a discussion about the nature of inappropriate content is a great way of dealing with these issues as it is not only about censorship but also about the reason behind it. I would be happy to hear your thoughts and ideas suggestions or ideas. We are always very happy to find volunteers (programmers, educators, etc) to help us improve our systems.

about things like that not making the front page, i know that you mean everything  on the front except for newest, but newest is on the front page.

rico wrote:

I have been using and promoting Scratch as a way to introduce students in grades 3 through 5. We have enjoyed what we've done very much, and the students and I have learned a lot with lots more to learn. We've always had these rules: #1. No human victims, #2. Nothing violent. And now my students have shown me Scratch programs like this one:

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Comcastc99/71491

Can anything be done to clean up Scratch, or should I abandon its use at our school and block the site? If I'm the only one who thinks this type of violence is inappropriate then that's what I'll have to do. It's been fun while it lasted, however. I've got students watching the Naruto Christmas Special over and over again.

I don't want to see that thing if it's innapropriate. So can you tell me why was it so bad?

I would not suggest to stop using Scratch. The kids would be kept out of a good learning experience. The only thing I could think of is Monitoring the Children screens at my High school my teachers have a program that allows them to see what they are viewing and the can block it. When I find out the program I will post it

rico wrote:

Thank you all for your thoughtful answers. Yes, our school does use Bluecoat filtering that I control, and I could block the Scratch website if necessary. Thank you for pointing out that we don't have to abandon Scratch entirely. We have Scratch installed on our computers, and I am posting the students' completed projects on our school intranet site, so even if I have to block the Scratch website, we can still continue to learn and benefit from Scratch in many ways. For now, I'll keep the Scratch site accessible and see how it goes. It's good if I can teach the students to avoid unacceptable content here at school, maybe these lessons will carry over to their Internet use at home where they may not have filtering software. Here at school, we follow these rules for Internet use...

1. No human victimes.
2. Nothing violent.
3. Nothing mindless.

All of our teachers try to reinforce this. I've got a pretty low tolerance for violence, however, and we have had to block some very good sites because the good outweighs the bad (according to the violence-meter in my mind). For example, Lego.Com has a lot of really good stuff, and we tried to keep the kids on the good stuff and away from the other stuff, but there are so many sword fighting games that the kids just can't seem to avoid, that we finally gave up, and I had to block the site. Anyway, please know that we LOVE Scratch here at my school, and we are really learning a lot. I am learning along with the students.

If you ban something because of cartoon violence (no gore or even blood), I think there would be some big problems:
The kids would hate you (kinda obvious)
The kids might take out their anger on somebody (not good)
The kids would try to get you fired
The kids would go on at home (making banning useless)
First about the getting you fired, it has happened to a teacher in my school (failed attempt poorly planned with bad reasoning though). Also, would you rather have the kids play some cartoony game or start fighting each other in real life (or do other stupid things). Maybe (I really mean just maybe this is not my opinion or anything I just thought) if you let the kids play and do bad things in games, they won't act as badly in real life.

Last edited by juststickman (2009-06-19 08:10:20)

JasonVoorhees wrote:

IS THERE A WAY TO GET PEOPLE TO STOP commenting on projects but let certain people comment?

no either everyone can comment or nobody can comment

juststickman wrote:

rico wrote:

Thank you all for your thoughtful answers. Yes, our school does use Bluecoat filtering that I control, and I could block the Scratch website if necessary. Thank you for pointing out that we don't have to abandon Scratch entirely. We have Scratch installed on our computers, and I am posting the students' completed projects on our school intranet site, so even if I have to block the Scratch website, we can still continue to learn and benefit from Scratch in many ways. For now, I'll keep the Scratch site accessible and see how it goes. It's good if I can teach the students to avoid unacceptable content here at school, maybe these lessons will carry over to their Internet use at home where they may not have filtering software. Here at school, we follow these rules for Internet use...

1. No human victimes.
2. Nothing violent.
3. Nothing mindless.

All of our teachers try to reinforce this. I've got a pretty low tolerance for violence, however, and we have had to block some very good sites because the good outweighs the bad (according to the violence-meter in my mind). For example, Lego.Com has a lot of really good stuff, and we tried to keep the kids on the good stuff and away from the other stuff, but there are so many sword fighting games that the kids just can't seem to avoid, that we finally gave up, and I had to block the site. Anyway, please know that we LOVE Scratch here at my school, and we are really learning a lot. I am learning along with the students.

If you ban something because of cartoon violence (no gore or even blood), I think there would be some big problems:
The kids would hate you (kinda obvious)
The kids might take out their anger on somebody (not good)
The kids would try to get you fired (recession+this= oh no!)
The kids would go on at home (making banning useless)
First about the getting you fired, it has happened to a teacher in my school (failed attempt poorly planned with bad reasoning though). Also, would you rather have the kids play some cartoony game or start fighting each other in real life (or do other stupid things). Maybe (I really mean just maybe this is not my opinion or anything I just thought) if you let the kids play and do bad things in games, they won't act as badly in real life.

justastickman, i think ur so right. to whever has the 1rst comment,lets put it this way. Whould you rather have students that blow ppl up in real life, or students that blow ppl up on the computer? I vote # 2.your answer though.

Sorry frogger3140, but that seems kinda irrelevant. On a related note, I believe that violence is going to happen as long as there is human emotion. Attempting to suppress it will achieve nothing good, only more trauma when the child encounters it.

Not sure if this is the correct forum to post, but couldn't find this issue being addressed.  What are the guidelines for including alcohol and drinking in your project?  I flagged one earlier today.