Reflections on NYC Scratch Educator Meetup: Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the May 2012 NYC Scratch Educator Meetup! A special thanks to our friends at Education Development Center (EDC)/Center for Children and Technology(CCT) for all of their generous support!

Here is a recap and some reflections from the event:

Attendees
Below is a list of the attendees:

• Amish Bhavsar
• Francisco Cervantes
• Susan Ettenheim
• Cameron Fadjo
• Keledy Kenkel
• Jason McDonald
• Tracy Rudzitis
• Clive Thompson
• Karen Brennan
• Michelle Chung

To connect with people you met, click on a name above to leave a message on their profile page.

Recap

• Speed Dating - In order to help participants meet new people, Michelle facilitated a speed dating activity at the beginning of the meetup.
  
• Show & Share - In this informal version of Show & Tell, attendees made short presentations of Scratch projects, student work, lesson plans, or other Scratch-related work, followed by feedback and discussion.

Show & Share

• ScratchEd - Karen introduced the ScratchEd online community and talked about the upcoming Scratch@MIT conference.
• Scratch Card Resources - Susan's students have developed their own Scratch Cards as extensions to the original Scratch Card resource. She shared the skipping sprite example from the YouTube channel and invited others to contribute using the Scratch Card template.
• Accel Learning - Amish, a Scratcher parent turned afterschool learning program cofounder, talked about his experiences and observations, particularly around gender participation. 
• Scratch Unit - Tracy shared her Scratch unit by showing one student's connect-the-dots Scratch project and presenting handouts of her lesson plans and assessment rubric.
• Scratch Curriculum - Cameron described a three-part, instructional Scratch curriculum he produced to help educators get started with Scratch.
• Scratch Course - James talked about using the Scratch Activities in his classes, presented sample student work, and invited people to the Packer Collegiate Institute Scratch Day event in December

Upcoming Dates and Events

• May ScratchEd Webinar Wednesday: "Assessing Computational Thinking", Wednesday, May 30 at 7pm EDT - http://scratchedwebinarmay2012.eventbrite.com
• June Scratch Educator Meetup at MIT, Saturday, June 2, 10am-1pm - http://jun2012meetup.eventbrite.com
• Scratch@MIT Conference, July 25-28 - http://events.scratch.mit.edu/conference
• Find out more about future events on our Events page.