Getting to Know Scratch 2.0

On Saturday, March 23, the ScratchEd Team hosted an exploratory Getting to Know Scratch 2.0 workshop at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 
 

Thirty six educators participated in the all-day intensive, which took place from 8:30am-4:30pm. The agenda was as follows:

•      8:30am Breakfast
•      9:00am Welcome and Introduction
•      9:30am-12:30pm Open-Building Session One
•      12:30pm Lunch
•      1:30pm-3:30pm Open-Building Session Two
•      3:30-4:30pm Sharing and Reflection
   

The workshop was organized as a series of open-building design sprints facilitated by a guide, which was designed to afford attendees the maximum amount of hands-on time with Scratch 2.0. The Getting to Know Scratch 2.0 guide was created as a collection of self-paced checklists, open-ended prompts, and puzzles created to give individuals a loose structure and autonomous atmosphere for exploring computational creativity. Participants new to Scratch could follow the capacity-building activities while other's more familiar with Scratch could jump straight to experimenting with some of the new features in Scratch 2.0. The workshop guide is available for download below.
 

Educators of varying teaching backgrounds (elementary, middle school, high school, public, charter, informal, formal, etc) joined the workshop. A few educators expressed an interest in connecting with others of similar experiences and interests, so a whiteboard in the back corner of the room was repurposed as a space for attendees to write notes and start conversations with one another.
 

As a facilitation team, we were excited to see that people weren't just interested in getting to know Scratch 2.0. Seated in pods of eight, we saw people making connections within and across groups, comparing puzzle solutions, collaborating on challenges, finding bugs, sharing triumphs, coming up with lesson plan ideas, and exchanging contact info.

Although the day was long, we really enjoyed the opportunity to learn alongside everyone and gain new experiences (and find new bugs!) in Scratch 2.0. You can view more photos from the event on Flickr or check out the video below that was shared at the end of the workshop as part of the reflection and sharing session.
 

Special thanks to everyone who attended the event, especially Janet Dee and Matthew Ong who helped facilitate the event.

Other Files: 

Scratch2.pdf