Share Your Research Interests

Hey,
I'm Scarlet and for quite some time I've been working with children (honestly speaking I never imagined myself being a teacher) but I've decided to work in a local orphanage. Kids over there are so great but it is just a shame this orphanage isn't equipt well. And for a couple of weeks I've been trying to teach these kids with scratched. Well some enjoy it, some don't. Still, such creative projects do benefit kids, even those who don't particularly like creative stuff. As to my research interests, that's all about teaching techniques in elementary school as well as educational psychology. Actually, I'm more interested into learning how our minds work and how to read a person (I've been doing research into this since college (this was my thesis topic at University of Washington and I decided to continue researching it with Research Paper Writings center) but when I was having my practical training in that orphanage I just couldn't stop myself from spending a couple of hours per day or two with them.

hi,
Like Ai Boon tan I am just a "scratcher" interested in research others are conducting.
Recently I've joined a volunteer team at the "RNIB" that supports their "Load2learn" website so I just wondered about the use of "scratch" by visually impaired people/students.

 Hi 
Iam vinaykumar from india. I just finished my MCA. i have done my final sem project-research on scratch programming. My question is how scratch is going to provide computational thinking. we have scratch research team. we found some methods like working on fractal examples, recursion techniques. my project name is
"SCRATCH FOR EDUCATION AND ITS LOCALIZATION" - i made entire scratch enviroment in kannada and i have developed so many examples and made corresponding documentation in kannada. scratch supports many languages. if you consider india, peoples are of different languages are there. i have visited so many schools in villages and i taught scratch programming. i made research paper on
1. INTEGRATING LANGUAGE AND ARTS WITH MIT SCRATCH
2. RECURSION- USING SCRATCH TO TEACH RECURSION CONCEPT FOR NOVICERS
    A. Recursion - part 1
    B. Recursion - part2
    C. Recursion - Part3
currently, i am creating a textbook on scratch programming in kannada. I am very interested to do research on scratch programming. we have separate scratch team here. currently i am working on this one only.
my approach is
Cloud implementation of scratch programming in india where in one place the users should get all the materials in all indian languages and scratch editor should be available in cloud.

Hi,

I am a full time teacher at an international school in Singapore and a part-time Ed.D. student in "instructional technology and distance education", fancy title, but simply educational technology. My main focus is educational robotics but the foundation of that, as with Scratch is constructionism so I am interested in Scratch research that contributes to our understanding in that area.

Presently, I devote one quarter to Scratch in my grade 8 (13 year olds) course. I might introduce it at a younger age as well, possibly linking it with WeDo robotics kits that we have. As is so often the case, time is the issue.

Happy Scratching and Researching,

Wayne

I'm Kylie Peppler, a faculty member in the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. My doctoral dissertation was supported by the Spencer Foundation to work with Dr. Yasmin Kafai at UCLA and focused on using Scratch as a platform for interactive media-art-making. We worked with the folks at the MIT Media Lab to develop and test the first versions of Scratch at an after-school center, called the Computer Clubhouse, in South Los Angeles. Originally, Scratch was designed for the Computer Clubhouse Network to engage youth in programming via media mixing. Much of the research is still ongoing but many of our  findings have been written up in conference proceedings and research articles. I thought I would list the references below for anyone that's interested. We also have a co-edited book that highlights some of our Scratch-related work titled, The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities (Teachers College Press, 2009). Additionally, I did my post-doctoral work at UCIrvine with Dr. Mark Warschauer. During this time, I worked with 80 second-graders using Scratch in the classroom. A high proportion of these youth had (dis)abilities but were able to do amazing things in Scratch. My current research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.
Feel free to contact me if you're interested in learning more at kpeppler@indiana.edu.
 
Books
Kafai, Y.B., Peppler, K., & Chapman, R. (Eds.) (2009). The Computer Clubhouse: Creativity and Constructionism in Youth Communities. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
 
Peer-reviewed journal articles

Kafai, Y. & Peppler, K. (in press, 2011). Youth, Technology, and DIY: Developing Participatory Competencies in Creative Media Production. In V. L. Gadsden, S. Wortham, and R. Lukose (Eds.), Youth Cultures, Language and Literacy. Review of Research in Education, Volume 34.
Peppler, K.  & Kafai, Y. B. (2010). Gaming Fluencies: Pathways into a Participatory Culture in a Community Design Studio. International Journal of Learning and Media, 1(4), pp. 1-14.
Peppler, K., Warschauer, M., & Diazgranados, A. (2010). Developing a Culture of Critical Game Design in a Second Grade Classroom. E-Learning, 7(1), pp. 35-48.
Peppler, K. (2010). Media Arts: Arts Education for a Digital Age. Teachers College Record, 112(8), pp. 2118–2153.
Kafai, Y. B., Desai, S., Peppler, K., Chiu, G. & Moya, J. (2008). Mentoring Partnerships in a Community Technology Center: A Constructionist Approach for Fostering Equitable Service Learning. Mentoring & Tutoring, 16(2), pp. 194-201.
Peppler, K. & Kafai, Y. (2007). From SuperGoo to Scratch: exploring creative digital media production in informal learning. Learning, Media, and Technology, 32(2), pp. 149–166.

 
Chapters and other contributions
Peppler, K. (2010). The New Fundamentals: Introducing Computation into Arts Education. In E. P. Clapp & M. J. Bellino (Eds.) 20Under40: Reinventing the Arts and Arts Education for the 21st Century.

Peppler, K. & Kafai, Y. (June, 2008). Children as Media Art Designers: Workshops for Creative Codings. Proceedings published in the 2008 Interaction Design for Children (IDC) Conference held at Northwestern University, Chicago, IL.
Peppler, K. and Kafai, Y.B. (June, 2008). Developing a Design Culture at the Computer Clubhouse: The Role of Local Practices and Mediators. Proceedings published in the 2008 International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) held at the University of Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands.
Peppler, K. and Kafai, Y.B. (June, 2008). Literacy and the Learning Sciences: Creating a Framework for Understanding and Analyzing Youths’ Media Arts Practices. Proceedings published in the 2008 International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) held at the University of Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands.
Maloney, J., Peppler, K., Kafai, Y.B., Resnick, M. and Rusk, N. (June, 2008). Digital Media Designs with Scratch: What Urban Youth Can Learn about Programming in a Computer Clubhouse. Proceedings published in the 2008 International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) held at the University of Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands.

Maloney, J., Peppler, K., Kafai, Y. B., Resnick, M., Rusk, N. (March, 2008). Programming by Choice: Urban Youth Learning Programming with Scratch. Proceedings published by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education, Portland, OR.
Peppler, K. & Kafai, Y. B. (September, 2007). What video game making can teach us about learning and literacy: Alternative pathways into participatory culture. In Akira Baba (Ed.), Situated Play: Proceedings of the Third International Conference of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) (pp. 369-376). Tokyo, Japan: The University of Tokyo.
Kafai, Y., Peppler, K., & Chiu, G. (2007). High Tech Programmers in Low Income Communities: Seeding Reform in a Community Technology Center.  In C. Steinfield, B. Pentland, M. Ackerman, &. N. Contractor (Eds.), Communities and Technologies 2007 (pp. 545-564). New York: Springer.
Peppler, K.  & Kafai, Y.B. (2007). Collaboration, Computation, and Creativity: Media Arts Practices in Urban Youth Cultures. Proceedings published by the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) Conference held at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.
Peppler, K. and Kafai, Y. (2006). Creative Codings: Personal, Epistemological, and Cultural Connections to Digital Art Production. Proceedings published in the 2006 International Conference of the Learning Sciences, Bloomington, IN.
Kafai, Y., Peppler, K., Alavez, M., and Ruvalcaba, O. (2006). Seeds of a Computer Culture: An Archival Analysis of Programming Artifacts from a Community Technology Center.  Proceedings Published in the 2006 International Conference of the Learning Sciences, Bloomington, IN.
 

Hello, my name is Yoshiro Miyata.  At Chukyo University in Japan, I have been studying trans-cultural learning, i.e., how we can learn collaboratively across cultural and generational boundaries.  I have been interested in the potential of Scratch to express, communicate, and collaborate to discover meaning that transcend cultural and generational differences. 

For this purpose, I am coordinating a collaborative project involving members of many universities, schools and community organizations who are using Scratch as a tool to express themselves and their ideas.   We are now running a series of workshops with Toyota City Lifelong Learning Center in our local community in which small children, students, adults and elderies in the 70's are collaborating to create Scratch animations based on narrative stories using scanned hand drawings and recorded voice.  In the past years, we ran workshops in which many children and adults from local Brazilian community collaborated with Japanese participants.  We are excited by the possibilities of collaboration of such diverse age and culture groups.

We are hoping to connect these local activities with activities around the world.  Right now, most partners are in Japan, except one school in the US and one in Inner-Mongolia in China, and I'm hoping to find more partners from around the world.

We have set up a website for this project:  http://sns.or6.jp/school-news/school-news-english , which links to galleries of Scratch projects and activities at various schools (mostly in Japanese).   We are trying to design this website as a gateway for introducing Japanese Scratch users to the users around the world.   It would be wonderful if we can connect this project with similar attempts in other parts of the world.

So, this is a research project trying to look at Scratch as embedded in the learning environments including the web, classrooms, people and communities, and to experiment how we can design such learning environment as a whole so that the people involved can learn from each other, because of, not in spite of, the differences in cultures and generations.

Hi, my name is Quinn Burke, and I am currently a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania studying with Yasmin Kafai. 

 

Currently I am examining middle schoolers' use of Scratch to tell stories.  In the past there have been a series of studies looking at how storytelling can offer kids an entrance into programming (most notably Caitlin Kelleher's work with the introductory language Alice, see http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/).  I am interested in how storytelling with Scratch can actually offer more than simply a "ramp" to get kids interested in programming but also speak back to the writing process itself, teaching kids how to develop a narrative, revise one's work, and put together the basic elements of a story grammar.  I am currently doing research in a middle school in West Philadelphia, using Scratch both inside a language arts classroom as well as in an afterschool club, exploring kids' creations and how they potentially tie into their development as writers. 

 

I am very interested in learning what kind of Scratch stories others are creating with kids and what success educators have experienced with introducing Scratch in terms of English/ language arts as well as storytelling.  I am also getting more and more interested in how kids share their stories online at the website and how fanfiction genres (e.g., Harry Potter stories/ Final Fantasy animations) can offer kids a scaffold not only in how to use the Scratch software but also as a means to navigate the website itself and make wider connections online.   

 

Hi everyone! I'm a member of the Scratch Team and a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab. I'm interested in the intersection of computer science and the social sciences (also known as social computing).  As part of my research, I led the development of the Scratch website. I'm interested in analyzing the way people use the website to better understand how to design social systems to support amateur creativity.

Hi

I'm Eliza Dresang and I'm a faculty member at the University of Washington Information School.  For almost two decades now I've been interested in the information behavior of youth growing up digital. I loved being at the Scratch conference because I felt among 'kindred souls.'

I am not conducting research at the moment with Scratch but I'm very interested in reserach anyone else is conducting. I'm working with doctoral student Kyungwon Koh, who suggested this discussion, and she will soon be embarking on part of her dissertation research with Scratch users. Right now I'm one degree removed.