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Creative Computing Online Workshop: Google CS4HS goes online
June 3, 2013
Google’s
Computer Science for High School
(CS4HS) program traditionally brings computer science workshops to locally train teachers how to incorporate CS and computational thinking into their classrooms. Through partnerships with universities, these workshops have reached thousands of teachers worldwide.
This year, CS4HS is piloting a new online format to allow anyone to participate in a CS4HS event. The first of the four online courses is built on the open source
Course Builder
platform and is entitled “
Creative Computing Online Workshop
;” it starts on today and runs for six weeks. We caught up with the workshop’s creator and head instructor Karen Brennan, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, to find out more about the project.
Your workshop is called “Creative Computing.” What exactly does that mean?
While I was a doctoral student at the
MIT Media Lab
, I co-hosted annual Google CS4HS events from 2009 until 2012 with Mitch Resnick -- workshops we called "Creative Computing." The name reflected a desire to broaden the scope of our CS4HS workshops beyond "computer science" and beyond "high school." The concepts, practices and perspectives that people explore in computer science are valuable across disciplines and across ages, and we wanted to emphasize the creative potential for a wide range of young learners. The Scratch programming language, which was developed at the MIT Media Lab, was our primary tool for exploring creative computing.
At Harvard, I have continued my work in supporting educators' explorations with Scratch, and the "Creative Computing" name still perfectly frames how I hope people will think about engaging with computing, computer science, and Scratch.
Does the workshop have a specific audience? Who should participate?
The workshop is designed primarily for K-12 educators. But anyone who is interested in learning more about creative computing with Scratch is welcome to join -- the workshop is not limited to a particular number of participants.
We hope that people from a wide range of backgrounds and settings -- and with varying levels of prior Scratch familiarity and comfort -- will participate.
What is the workshop like?
The workshop is six weeks long, and runs from Monday, June 3 until Friday, July 12. The first three weeks, called Foundations, are an opportunity to develop greater familiarity and fluency with the Scratch authoring environment and online community through a series of scaffolded activities. The final three weeks, called Explorations, are an opportunity to define and pursue a self-directed project (such as designing Scratch activities, documenting your experiences of helping others learn Scratch, or experimenting with advanced features), which you can develop on your own or with others.
Each week is composed of primarily asynchronous interactions, so you can work at your own pace, depending on your schedule and your time zone. The asynchronous components include mini-lectures, activity overviews and walkthroughs, tutorials, and discussion forums -- and will be made available at the beginning of each week. These asynchronous interactions are accompanied by twice-weekly synchronous sessions (a.k.a. "Office Hours"), held on Tuesday evening and Friday morning (Boston time).
You can participate as much or as little as you like during the six weeks -- and all of the resources will be publicly available after the workshop.
This workshop focuses on the use of Scratch. Can you tell me more about what Scratch is and why you chose it for this workshop?
Scratch, developed by researchers at the MIT Media Lab, is a free authoring environment for creating interactive media and an online community for sharing those interactive media creations. Launched in 2007, Scratch is used by hundreds of thousands of people (mostly ages 8 through 18) around the world, and more than 3 million projects have been created and shared through the Scratch online community.
"Creative computing" isn't Scratch-specific -- there are many other great tools that can serve as entry-points for exploring the big ideas underlying creative computing. But Scratch was a natural choice for the workshop because it was designed for a broad audience, with the aim of making interactive media creation accessible to as many people as possible. I was also a member of the Scratch Team at the Media Lab for 5 years, so it is something with which I am familiar!
I also chose Scratch because a new version was recently launched in May 2013. Scratch 2.0 includes a new web-based project authoring environment and many new features (such as cloning, custom blocks, and cloud variables), and the online workshop will serve as an opportunity to explore the new version.
How does someone get involved?
Join us at
creative-computing.appspot.com
. You can participate as much or as little as you like -- dive into building Scratch projects, connect with others interested in creative computing, or just explore the resources. The Creative Computing Online Workshop facilitation team is excited about working with you and learning from your experiences.
For updates on Creative Computing Online and the other in-person and online CS4HS workshops, join our
CS4HS G+ community
, open to all students, teachers and other CS enthusiasts.
Posted by Erin Mindell, Program Manager for Education
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