Southeast US region and East TN area

Hello, I am trying to find out more information about educators that use Scratch and Scratch 2.0 in the southeast USA and East Tennessee area. I see a few planned Scratch Day events in my region, but nothing close by yet. I would be interested in co-organizing a Scratch Day as well as collaboration on individual Scratch projects. I would also be interested in simply connecting with any ScratchED users in my area.

I am just now getting into Scratch as a student and parent. I have previous experience with QBasic in high school, and spent most of my youth running dial-up and telnet BBSs, programming and building MUDs and BBS Door games, and creating/downloading MOD and MIDI songs. I have been exploring technology over the years at an informal pace and am formally switching to an IT track in futures soon. A favorite pasttime lately has been integrating Scratch with MaKey MaKey. I am learning the basics about Arduino, Python, RaspberryPi, 3D printing, a variety of other exciting experiences at my local Makerspace/Hackerspace. I place a lot of value in kinesthetic learning and visual programming languages like Scratch. I like that the spirit of programming and coding is very much a part of Scratch just as the spirit of innovation is captured in MaKey MaKey's open versatility in simplicity. Tools such as Scratch are very positive and fertile atmospheres for both transitioning into more sophisticated and traditional text-based syntax-centric languages while teaching the important basics in a fun way.

I have toyed around with remixing, and am looking at picking up pace to delve into more of what Scratch has to offer. I would be interested in collaborating on advanced Scratch projects with others, especially anything that can be turned into a ScratchED resource or has useful academic value. I am currently working on a series of educational curriculum-based games that parody different genres of popular games and could definitely use creative and multi-talented co-conspirators.

Also looking for insight and feedback.