A day with the ICA/RYMAEC

Michelle and I facilitated a workshop for art and media educators at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston last week -- and we wanted to share what we did at the workshop. Here's a rough sketch of the afternoon:

15 minutes of background information

• Describing what Scratch is.
• Demonstrating the basic mechanism of snapping blocks together.
• Showing some inspiring examples, which are available in a Scratch gallery at http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/116946.

10 minutes of free-form exploration

• Without any direct instruction, letting people poke around the Scratch interface and see what they discover. I don't let this go too long -- I set a timer for 10 minutes -- it's meant to set a tone of exploration, which I think is necessary for playing with Scratch.
• After the 10 minutes, sharing things people noticed/discovered, both at each table and then with the whole group.

60 minutes of interactive collage

• Demoing the start of an interactive collage -- selecting a theme, adding a sprite, making the sprite interactive.
• Passing out a handout. I recently revised the interactive collage handout -- http://scratched.media.mit.edu/resources/interactive-collage -- to have a bit more step-by-step.
• Giving participants lots of building time.
• At the end of the block, doing a gallery walk to see what people have made.

Break

Remaining time for pass-it-on story

• Demoing the start of a pass-it-on story -- where everyone begins a project and, after a certain amount of time, passes the project on to someone by rotating computers. I decided not to have people rotate computers, as everyone was really, really engaged in their project.
• Giving participants lots of building time.
• At the end of the block, presenting projects in a show and tell format, with people coming to the front of the room to demonstrate their projects through the projector.