The Creative Computing Curriculum, designed by the Creative Computing Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is a collection of ideas, strategies, and activities for an introductory creative computing experience using Scratch.
What is creative computing?
Creativity
Computer science and computing-related fields are often introduced to young people in a way that is disconnected from their interests and values—emphasizing technical detail over creative potential. Creative computing supports the development of personal connections to computing, by drawing upon creativity, imagination, and interests. |
Agency
Many young people with access to computers participate as consumers, rather than designers or creators. Creative computing emphasizes the knowledge, practices, and fundamental literacies that young people need to create the types of dynamic and interactive computational media that they enjoy in their daily lives. |
Computing
Creating computational artifacts prepares young people for more than careers as computer scientists or programmers. It supports young people’s development as computational thinkers—individuals who can draw on computational concepts, practices, and perspectives in all aspects of their lives, across disciplines and contexts. |
What is Scratch?
There are many different tools that can be used for creative computing. In this curriculum, we use Scratch, which is a free computer programming language available at https://scratch.mit.edu. With Scratch, people can create a wide variety of interactive media projects—animations, stories, games, and more—and share those projects with others in an online community. Since Scratch’s launch in May 2007, millions of people all around the world have created and shared more than 46 million projects.
What is this resource?
The activities in this curricular resource are designed to support familiarity and increasing fluency with computational creativity and computational thinking, while building on students' creativity and personal interests. In particular, the activities encourage exploration of key computational thinking concepts (sequence, loops, parallelism, events, conditionals, operators, data) and key computational thinking practices (experimenting and iterating, testing and debugging, reusing and remixing, abstracting and modularizing). Learn more about computational thinking—what it is and how to assess its development in learners—from resources in the appendix or by visiting https://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/ct