Reflections on Scratch Educator Meetup @ MIT: Saturday, January 7, 2011

Thanks to everyone who was able to join us for the first Scratch educator meetup of 2012!

Here's what happened...

Attendees
Here's a list of people who attended Saturday's meetup:

• Sandra Bleecker
• Janet Dee
• Ernest Dodson
• Kate Farb-Johnson
• Erika Gold
• Ingrid Gustafson
• Abby Howell
• Tom Kowalczyk
• Sarah Judd
• Jennifer Junkin
• Colin Meltzer
• Chris Mosier
• Prathima Rhodes
• Jean Sorensen
• Karen Brennan
• Michelle Chung
• Aaron Morris
• Ricarose Roque

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Recap

• We started out with a speed networking activity to get to know each other's learning goals for 2012 and for the day's meetup.
• Then, the group brainstormed topics for breakout sessions.
• Colin led one breakout group around "Struggling Scratchers." The group developed strategies for encouraging persistance when students get stuck.
• Ernest spearheaded another group about "Speed Scratching" to think of how to best deal with the issue of lacking sufficient time when teaching Scratch in a classroom setting.
• Sandra and Janet led a discussion about how to approach administration to garner support for Scratch programs.
• Karen met with participants who were interested proposal submission ideas for the upcoming Scratch@MIT conference. The deadline is February 15.
• Over lunch, members from each breakout groups shared summaries with the rest of the participants, followed by a lightning round Show & Tell.
• View photos from the event on Flickr.

Show & Tell

• Jenny and Colin shared an assessment worksheet that they have been collaborating on to evaluate students' learning of math concepts using Scratch.
• Ingrid demoed some interactive name projects created by her first and second graders. Ingrid explained how she took advantage of the voice recording feature in Scratch to capture student interviews about their work.
• Ernest shared Scratch projects from his summer camp students.
• Ricarose introduced Collab Camp, a virtual event on the Scratch website that invites Scratchers to create Scratch projects in teams.
• Colin talked about a new resource he developed - a set of Scratch challenges that scaffold students learning of the basic concepts of Scratch and programming in a fun way.
• Kate shared examples from students who have used Scratch to complete projects for their math and history classes.

Future Events

• Next meetup: Saturday, February 4, 10am to 1pm
• Intro Scratch Workshop: Saturday, January 14, 12pm-4pm
• Next webinar: Wednesday, January 25 at 7pm EDT
• Find out more about these upcoming events on our Events page.