helpful-ish guy wrote:
I understand both sides of this dilemma, but the Scratch Team, must look into their own mission and philosophy. I first downloaded Scratch because it was said to be "away to help young people ages 8 and up develop 21st century learning skills with an easy-to-use programming tool." (~NSDL.org). While I know this may or may not have been the original intent of the Scratch Team, it is the word that is spreading very quickly in educational circles.
Hopefully just as any teacher should preview web content that they are about to use with their students, they should also determine the appropriateness of Scratch for their classroom. I believe if the Scratch team intends it to be student-oriented tool for 21st century classrooms, then a way to keeping out inappropriate material is their duty.
However, if it is a program meant for ALL AGES, then the Scratch team needs to articulate this in their homepage. There are other similar applications on the web such as Stagecast Creator, but they distinctly are marketed to children and learning and to date seem to be void of this problem.
As an educator myself, I would love a filtered or school version of Scratch, because I at the present time the site is not appropriate for school, not just because of the violence, but because the nature of the nonacademic animations degrades educational value of the program itself. Many students would have a hard time using the program for the multitude of educational lessons you could implement, when they could use it to blow off heads and make red blood ooze.
I look forward to seeing where scratch goes.
i'm homeschooled at CHEP, so i use scratch to learn how to make videogames. but my first succesful one was my "im back" project
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natalie wrote:
We are working on a version of the Scratch site that only shows projects that have been looked over and screened to make sure they are appropriate for everyone.
Our plan is to leave the http://scratch.mit.edu site as it is, but to create a new site (with a different URL) that shows only reviewed/approved content.
We are trying to decide what to call the new site. Here are some possibilities:
school.scratch.mit.edu
safe.scratch.mit.edu
e.scratch.mit.edu (where e could stand for "education" or "everyone")
Another option is to have everyone go to http://scratch.mit.edu , but allow two different types of accounts: one type which has access only to reviewed/approved projects, another type which has access to all the types of projects currently available on the Scratch site.
We are trying to figure out which approach --and name for the site-- would work best. Do you have any suggestions?
There is nothing worse than a newcomer to a forum starting to complain about the forum. That said, I am going to be one.
I am a newcomer to the Scratch forum and my reaction is that, for the most part, the forum serves not as a place where students exchange technical information about computer programming, but instead as just another social network similar to MySpace and FaceBook. Probably 80-percent of all posts are by youngsters discussing how they are going to form groups, or how they are going to quit one group so that they can join another group, or how the members of this group or that group has disrespected them, and other non-technical trivia such as that.
Perhaps the forum needs to establish a social-networking category and require that all such posts be made in that category, leaving the remaining categories open to students who have a strong desire to learn about computer programming.
While I am favorably impressed with Scratch as a programming tool for students, I am not favorably impressed with the overall atmosphere on the forum. I am a college professor and don't have concerns about my students seeing inappropriate material on a web site, but if I taught middle school or secondary school, I would try to keep my students as far away from the forum as possible because of the social-networking atmosphere that pervades.
Dick Baldwin
Free Alice tutorials: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocalice.htm
Free Scratch tutorials: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocHomeSchool.htm
Free Java/C#, etc. tutorials: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/toc.htm
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