Reflections on Scratch Educator Meetup @ MIT: Saturday, April 5, 2014

Thanks to everyone who attended the April 2014 Scratch Educator Meetup! Here is a list of participants and some resources from the event:

Attendees
Below is a list of people who attended:

• Christan Balch
• Derek Breen
• Lyre Calliope
• Audrey Dau
• Janet Dee
• Sandra Flanagan
• Steve Gordon
• Abduhlrahman Idlbi
• Rupal Jain
• Tracey Jansen
• Jennifer Judkins
• Lorraine Leo
• Mary Sue Lindley
• Helina Mekonnen
• Barbara Mikolajczak
• Ashley Mondesir
• Denise Perry
• Natalie Paine
• Heather Peachey
• Rory Phimister
• Elaine Rittershaws
• Laura Rout
• Adam Scharfenberger
• John Scott
• Silvia Scott
• Rosemary Slattery
• Sean Stern
• Joy Tomadakis
• Daniel Watt
• LeeAnn Wells
• Elisabeth White
• Michelle Chung
• Jeff Hawson

To connect with someone from the meetup, click on their name above and leave a message on their profile page to start a conversation.

Recap

• Who are you? Why are you here? - Following morning networking over coffee and Flour pastries, attendees introduced themselves to one another answering the following questions: What's your name? Where are you from? What do you do? What are you here for?
• Agenda Co-Creating - The participants were challenged to co-create the schedule for the day by first, brainstorming session ideas on stickies in small groups, and then collectively grouping similar topics together on the wall. After a few minutes, we had our agenda for the day -- in record time!
• Breakout Sessions - Two sets of 35-minute breakout sessions took place at the meetup. During the first set of sessions, Sean led an hands-on introduction to Scratch while Christan facilitated a discussion around activities and projects. Abdulrahman took a small group downstairs to the Lifelong Kindergarten group's lab space to demonstrate ways to connect Scratch with hardware. In the second set of sessions, Derek led a small group discussion around outreach while Sean hosted a session  to talk about hackathon and afterschool Scratch club ideas. Meanwhile, in the couch area, Barbara organized a conversation about Scratch curricular connections to standards.
• Lunch Discussions - Over lunch, we took down suggestions from the whole group for possible Scratch PD opportunities, Michelle shared an update on ScratchJr, and Lyre talked about Mozilla Webmaker. Other announcements and resources are listed below.
• Photos - Pictures from the event are available on Flickr.

Announcements and Resources

• Scratch@MIT 2014 Conference, August 6-9 at MIT
• Scratch Day 2014 is May 17
• Next Scratch Educator Meetup is Saturday, May 3
• ScratchJr
• Mozilla Webmaker
• MIT StarLogo

Sign up to join the next meetup at MIT taking place on Saturday, May 3. We hope to meet up with you there!