Scratch

I would go to www.weebly.com  and make your own free website, then only alow the students to use the scratch software and not allow them to go on the website. then post  thier projects on weebly.com!    so they can view eachothers projects and stuff...    IDK! 

TobiOlivers wrote:

i don't think its bloody games we need to get worked up over. its games that are racist, sexually inappropiate, and offensive.

Exactly. Pornography. sexually explicit, and alcohol and drugs is what we need to get rid of. And really bloody gory realistic games. I mean, here are some examples of what and what not to do on Scratch:


Good, addicting, fun project for all ages:

1st person shooter and you are shooting balloons.


Addicting project with Warning:

Mild cartoon violence with an it-se bit-se bit of blood, unrealistic.

Not Allowed on Scratch Website:

Shooting people and having LOTS of blood come out, with no warning, realistic, pornography, sexually explicit.

Maybe, I dont know. That shouldn't even be on Scratch. 

bobfredproductions wrote:

Locomule wrote:

Rico:"I have been using and promoting Scratch as a way to introduce students in grades 3 through 5." Introduce them to what, incomplete sentences? Bad diction?

"We have enjoyed what we've done very much, and the students and I have learned a lot with lots more to learn." Again, this sentence reads like a punch drunk fighter.

"We've always had these rules:" Actually I think you mean you have always imposed these rules on your students...

"#1. No human victims, #2. Nothing violent." Oh really? Tell me please, does your school have a sports program? Football, perhaps? Or any competition involving actual children in thinly veiled feats of combat where someone always loses? Losers who usually suffer public humiliation as well as creating a legacy of failure that may result in various negative impacts on their ability to succeed as students in the future, snowballing into mental blocks which may impede their lives for many years to come? Wanna see most males lose their * minds? Emasculate them in public. Violence 101.

What I find far more appalling and frightening than simulated violence in Scratch video games is educators who think that they have the right to dictate the social morays of future generations based on nothing more than there own personal whims.

"Can anything be done to clean up Scratch, or should I abandon its use at our school and block the site?" Ahhh, the inevitable threat. Personally, I think you should resign. But seriously though, lets back up a bit...

"And now my students have shown me Scratch programs like this one: " Ok, I am making an assumption here but I suspect that it is true. That being that apparently, in spite of your 'protective' posturing you have in fact been allowing your students "grades 3 through 5" unmonitored access to parts of the internet. I think I am beginning to see why you feel that others should fix this "problem" as you seem somewhat incompetent in dealing with the obvious shortcomings of your own mismanagement. Maybe you should get them unmonitored cable access and then complain to the cable companies that they should change their programing. Even a basic familiarity with Scratch would be enough for someone, especially an educator, to realize that you could just download and host the specific projects that are deemed MOST appropriate for your students. There is an entire section of Scratch devoted to nothing but educators using Scratch in the classroom environment. That is where they discuss something called curriculum, I bet you've heard that term before.  Curriculum which is being tailored to match the individual needs of each educator be it Math, Physics, Science, etc. Somewhat of a different concept then just handing the kids the keys to the Ferrari and demanding that they drive safely.

"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." The threat of punishing the students through denying them knowledge is repeated and now we are warned that the threat will be carried out unless we agree with Rico. And those darn troublemakers are REPEATEDLY watching that Naruto Christmas Special, hosted by scratch, and co-hosted by Rico.


Ok, in some fairness to Rico, it is fairly easy to tear someone's post apart limb by limb (whoops, I just simulated human violence right there! I meant trees?!!?) and I am probably exaggerating my point somewhat. So I will now give my $2000.02 worth (here is where this post really gets long, lol) on this debate that is older than most of the Scratch users themselves.

Violence in video games. I do not have generally a problem with it because it is one of the most ridiculous theories I have ever heard. Living creatures exist by eating other creatures that were once alive. Like it or not, it is the natural order of things. If you doubt that, I hardily invite you to coat yourself down with honey and peanut butter and spend a few nights deep in the heart of some select National Forests. Yes, we have conditioned ourselves to generally be repulsed by some random Animal Planet show with actual footage of sharks eating seals. Yet we have little to no problem watching those same seals and sharks snacking on some random fish species.
We practice a very selective and almost humorously incongruent form of deciding what is right and wrong. Blowing someone's head off is a terrible crime... unless you are a police officer or are in the military and protecting the oil rights of some multi-billion dollar company. In those cases, you are most likely a hero. Violence against humans is terrible right? Does your school have a ROTC program? Are there, as is so common now, armed security guards patrolling the campus? When we got caught up in the "school shooting" media hype frenzy and allowed it to affect our education system, we ruined far more lives than all the school shootings combined. We took a percentage of students who were and will always be prevalent within the system and renamed them from class clowns and potential dropouts to criminals. What a sense of ambition we have inspired there! Previously you failed because you were stupid. Now, there is an implied chance that your inability to fit in, make grades, gain peer acceptance, etc. may be because YOU are the prison fodder for which the security officers are ever vigilant. I suppose we should also quickly edit all the History books as I have never in my life read any other literature which imparts so much importance on real, documented human violence.
I could go on until my keyboard breaks. Check out the Star Spangled Banner some time on the Wiki. Our National Anthem is a song about a war battle, with a melody taken from a British drinking song, containing lyrics such as "And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air." By your own definitions Rico, a Scratch game or animation based on our National Anthem would most surely have to be banned. Or would you deem it ok because you could personally justify that content for such usage? Ahhh, the conundrums we create and then fall headfirst into.

Personally, I wonder how many of the people demanding that we stop teaching our kids violence through simulated violence in video games have ever found themselves in the midst of some violent activity only to resend their actions after realizing that the 'video games made them do it.' The entire notion is absurd to the point of being insulting. Their are many other far more damning, tangible injustices being committed against our children in our school systems. So many kids in a class that the teacher becomes more of a referee. Administrators who intimidate teachers  into compromising their positive impact on students for reasons that have nothing to do with the best interests of the students. A federal government who was intentionally cut out of overseeing public education (ever wonder why out of so many things taken into consideration in our Constitution, never is there mentioned a necessity of the government regulating education?)  and yet has done so anyway by subsidizing schools who comply with Federal academic proposals while withholding money from schools who won't just play ball. How about administrations who recognize the seriously harmful gap created by parents who largely remain uninvolved in their childrens' schoolwork, yet do nothing to fix this. I mean, there is a Facebook site dedicated to parents who are angry at teachers for promoting No Child Left Behind! These parents are showing their ignorance to an embarrising extreme. Teachers have almost universally spoken out against this very thing!

As parents, we may be the most to blame. We tell bedtime stories where the good guys always win. Bullies are thwarted, injustices righted, and then we tell her that she is the most special little princess in the whole wide world. Awwww... Hey, I do it too! I'm certainly not claiming to be better than anyone else. ut I think we are all heroes as well as villains. I believe that it is far more dangerous to classify the world in black and whites as opposed to shades of grey. Because everything is relative.
Kids instinctively know this. They laugh at the wrong things, are unashamed to stare at someone with a physical deformity, and will quickly threaten each other with every conceivable disaster up to and including violence if they don't reap the rewards of their own selfish demands. School itself is based entirely on a system of rewards and punishments. We lie to our kids and tell them "if you work hard enough, you will get ahead." Imagine a world where magically, students were each and everyone successful and made straight A's. Who is gonna dig the ditches? Clean the toilets? Sweep up your room and empty your trash at the end of the school day? The scam is perpetuated by and deeply ingrained in every level of our society, but don't think for a minute that everyone falls for it. The poor kids who grew up watching their parents and grandparents fight unsuccessfully against things like racism may not make it into Mensa, but they know that they are far less likely to wind up driving a Porche home from their corporate CEO position than winding up in dilapidated homes and being eyed by potential employers as though they are there to rob the place. So we separate the wheat from the chaffe, the bomb builders from the great unwashed. Kids play violent video games because they are fun. If they don't find them fun, they play something else. The games don't twist our little darlings, they come out of the womb with far more an inclination towards violence than most people would ever want to admit. It is called human nature. You show me a philosophy of education that damns violence, sexuality, and all the other uncomfortable little quirks of human existence and I'll show you one that is so unrealistic that to follow it is pure folly. Now you are telling kids that they are bad for expressing qualities that they were born with yet are fundamental to our survival as a species?!?! Um, they are not idiots, you know? Even they know that this debate is trite and unrealistic. You can propose that we all just 'be good people' but whose fault is it when you get angry because it doesn't happen?

You may think the solution to inspiring the lives of our children is to lock them away from the things that personally offend you but I disagree. You have no right. It is not your job, mine, or anyone else's to mold them with razor-edged cookie cutters. Besides, that doesn't work. What does work is inspiring them by giving them knowledge, showing them that ultimately they will have to mold themselves, and providing alternatives to the status quo of current social commentary. Yes, there will always be gratuitousness in any arena which is frustrating but still is not worth locking the kids up in a self-riteous bubble. But I don't care how over-the-top, blood guts and gore silly a game is, it will never bear remotely as much impact on lives as our own basic human instincts. Fight or flight, aka. eat or be eaten. It is no coincidence that we have emerged at the top of the food chain! Of course I'm not advocating an hour a day of Call of Duty time for kids at school. But claiming that fantasy violence in video games is the smoking gun behind criminally bound futures is worse than silly, it is like proposing a treatment without finding out what is wrong with the patient.  Physician, heal thy self! Ae you certain that a more important factor might not be something like right or left-handedness? A 2004 study conducted by Faurie and Raymond complementing ethnographic data with a discussion of the success of left-handers in certain sports, to demonstrate that left-handed individuals have a competitive advantage in combat. The rate of left-handedness appears to correlate with the amount of violence in a given society (taking homicide rates as a measure). How about the staggering number of people killed through history for religious reasons and causes? I'll leave it up to you Rico to take on the churches. Good luck with that too.
All right, I'm through. My last comment will be about how this takes me back to my Dungeons and Dragons days circa 1983. If commonly touted insights into the impending doom of any hapless child caught within the satanic tendrils of that game were true, I guess that would explain most of the violence in America today. In my opinion, we actually just had a lot of fun and garnered an amazing amount of historical and and generally geeky knowledge. We just didn't get the marked improvements of reaction time and hand eye coordination and along with it! >   The reason violence shows up repeatedly in video games is because, like it or not, it is simply entertaining. Not to everyone, just the vast majority. I wish that we could all evolve beyond our out-dated needs for and preoccupations with violence, materialism, racism, cultism, etc. I also wish that magic was real. Wouldn't that be cool?

But hey, I always try to remember that I could be wrong. Peace.

u r so wise

Was quoting this really necessary?

I'm tired of this, YOU DON'T NEED TO GET RID OF THE VIOLENT GAMES. I mean c'mon people, real life isn't that much better, the only thing Scratch should remove is Pornographic games, sexually explicit games and drug usage in games.

It's great that you pointed this out. As me not being a teacher but a student, I agree with you, but can't help. I think that you should keep scratch at your school. It can be fun and educational for the students and I wouldn't take that away from them. My class uses Scratch a lot, and I have only seen one slightly violent project made by anyone in my grade. In that case, my teacher was thinking about banning scratch, too, but didn't. Instead, she banned the people who are making the violent projects from scratch. And, in the case of kids watching the Naruto Christrtmas Special and DREAMEATER projects and stuff like that, Don't let them use the website. Keep the program. Block the website. And did one of your students make the Naruto Christmas Special? If so, that kid is messed up. So anyway, thats my advice.

i don't watch the show, or read the books, but i play the video games and they are not very good.

bosox397 wrote:

Scratch should try to install a filter system where they view the project before allowing it onto the website and if its bad they can not let it on the website. It'd be hard, but (i think) doable

That would only work if there were tons of reliable people (like us) who would really know if it should go on the scratch website or not. Then the scratch team would give us the privilege to pre-screen those projects. It would kind of be like the scratch forum moderators. If we had about 1000, everyone would only need to screen about 1 or 2 projects a day. What do you think Scratch Team?

scratchcritic564 wrote:

big-bang wrote:

PokemonMaster64 wrote:

If you have those three rules, I would suggest banning computers and internet altogether. We all try to hide from these things, but you can't be young and innocent forever... violence... is something we can't hide from. I don't get what you mean by no human victims. Killing aliens is still violent. Also, mindless? Isn't it OK to be a little crazy sometimes? Also, you never mentioned blood. Blood does not always go along with violence. There could be a project with someone who os injured in it. That could have blood too. You would have to live in a box to live by rules that are that strict!
[blocks]<stop all>[/blocks] contact with computers if you want to keep those rules!

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.

GOOBA STOPING!!!! wat the!
wat is this world coming to! you peppol dont liek GOOBA STOPING!!!!!!!! ;(

Magnie wrote:

I Play It anyways. Even my brothers and sisters (3-8) 

  me too.

Wait... a little off topic.... anyways,

Rico you shouldn't worry much- most scratch projects are appropriate and it's HRD to find a Violent one.

News-guy wrote:

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.

Violent behavior may be bad buy you should also take notice to other project which may contain use of drugs, use of tobbaco, use of alchol, gambling, mature themes, nudity and language are just as common as projects with blood and violence.

http://www.gamestop.com/Ratings
Maybe you should see this

<forever><say[ PLEASE STOP BLOOD AND GORE

Last edited by Luigitailsdoll45 (2010-02-11 17:44:14)