Scratch is a great project, and I applaud its attempts to teach computer skills to children. However, wouldn't it be neat if there were some way to use Scratch to fight the world's problems. Scratch already has a dedicated user base, and I think it would be a win-win situation if there were some way to focus all that creative energy towards important global issues.
Here are some ways the web has been used to fight such problems:
www.thehungersite.com
www.freerice.com
Scratch should be able to use the unique and varied talents of the members of its community for similar goals.
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I like your idea! The community has already generated more than 1 million scripts of code! That's a lot of human thinking time.
Umm, I wonder what kind of things we could do. The simplest way would be to talk about problems and solutions for some the world's problems, or focusing on your local community, that would be even even better since there is more we can do to make our own house or neighborhood a better place.
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Tree_of_knowledge, the www.freerice.com website is an interesting one in that it combines computer games, vocabulary learning, and working to fight hunger in one simple idea. What ideas can people come up with for scratch to combine multiple good ideas? It already has computer games and teaching kids programming skills, so it has the fun and the education components, but how can we add social justice to the mix?
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But it's almost nothing. www.freerice.com is 10 grains per question. There are something like 500 grains in one bowl of rice.
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But the combined efforts of lots of users has resulted in over 11 billion grains, which is over 20 million bowls of rice. That is beginning to be a significant amount.
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