Let's celebrate Scratch's Birthday - join World Scratch Birthday Project, online!
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Scratch becomes 5 years old on the 19th of May, Scratch Day of 2012.
We all Scratchers owe a lot of good experiences and learning to Scratch. Why not celebrate Scratch's 5th birthday by sending birthday messages as Scratch project?
In "World Museum", which is a world-wide network of collaborators, we are creating a large animation (we will use a modified version of Scratch with 1280x720 stage size) with birthday messages from all around the world. We would like to invite everyone to contribute a message.
Please take a look at World Scratch Birthday Project. We have just put messages by some people to give you an image of what it will look like. Many balloons will be floating, and if you click a balloon, it will pop and say a birthday message for Scratch.
I hope you will be interested in joining us. It is very easy to contribute: just draw your own balloon and write a birthday message.
See the World Scratch Birthday Project page for how you can send your message to Scratch.
I started my involvement with Scratch recently, hoping to be able to write and run some Scratch programs on a notebook PC or Android tablet. One limiting factor was Scratch's stage size, and whether I can run a program using the whole screen area or almost all of the available PC/Tablet work area.
Scratch's stage size, as I learned and researched through many different forums messages, is described as basicly fixed, or so I believed until I saw the above posting by Yoshiro Miyata, mentioning a "modified version of Scratch with 1280x720 stage size".
I would like to be able to use such version, and will be thankful for anyone who can point me in the right direction for getting a file for installation on PC and/or Android.
Thanks,
Uzi Notev
Dear Uzi Notev,
This is Yoshiro Miyata. Yes, I think the large stage size gives Scratch more expressive power.
A friend of mine, Manabu Sugiura of Tsuda College in Tokyo, modified the Scratch source code and created the Scratch with resizable stage size.
We have been using it for many of our projects in World Museum, a network of people around the world collaborating to create projects that are meaningful for everyone involved. The large stage size has been very useful, not oly because we can make beautiful projects, but also because it gives the children around the world (more than 200 kids in 10 countries in some projects) the experience of contributing to the collaborative efforts of so many people from around the world.
We thought it will be useful for many people, so you can now download it from here! (If the page is displayed in other language, try "translations") Hope you will enjoy it! If you have any questions or problems, just let us know.
Dear Yoshiro Miyata,
Thank you very much for taking the time and replying in detail and so quickly. Your work for advancing collaboration seems to me to be a source of pride and satisfaction!
As for Scratch - the resizable stage size seems to me like BIG news for the 'Scratching' community. I really hope it is adopted as a baseline for further developments.
I already downloaded the zip file, and hope to 'give it a go' tomorrow.
From my 1st look at the license.txt text file, I got the impression that it may be MAC (Apple) oriented and hope itdoesn't rule out running on Windows , and I assume I may have to look further for some setup instructions, so I'm going to take a second look into the dowloaded file tomorrow...
Thank you so much!,
Uzi Notev
Scratchers contributed to the World Scratch Birthday Project during MIT's Scratch Day event on Saturday, May 19, thanks to Lorraine Leo!
Michelle,
Thank you for sharing the photo. I'm glad that the birthday messages by so many people were seen there. This project was initiated by Lorraine Leo in Boston and went all the way to Australia, Asia, Russia, Europe, and back to Boston, all around the globe! I hope the people at the party enjoyed sending their messages.
(By the way, thank you Michelle for your help in the World Friends Project at the Boston Chidlren's Museum in April. We plan to do a new project there during the Scratch@MIT conference in July.)
This was a great project for us to be involved in. I heard about scratch four years ago and was keen to get use it with my classes, but I did not know enough about it. Over the years, I have started and then hit a brick wall due to lack of confidence and knowledge. However this project was great. The fact my grade 4/5 class could download the balloon with accompanying code, meant they could customize the balloon easily taste, fix up their code should they have altered any of it and complete the task in a lesson. They loved the 'popping' nature of the balloons. This has inspired me and my classes to keep playing with Scratch. Thanks again and Happy Birthday, Scratch!
Anne Mirtschin, Australia
Dear Anne,
We are excited to hear that you and your students enjoyed this project. I hope your students will enjoy seeing their balloons in the World Scratch Birthday Project with all the balloons created by many others. I think that's when their vision will expand from their works to other people around the world working together with them!
Please enjoy other projects in World Museum, such as the World Lunchbox Project and the World Friends Project, too!
Yoshiro Miyata, World Museum Project