Scratch!

When Dr. Li presented her research on Enactivism and Education through Gaming, I was most impressed with Scratch -- a modular programming language with a simple interface that allows users with little to no programming knowledge to create interactive games.

This is interesting to me because I teach pre-service teachers who will become Computer Studeies teachers for students in grades 7-12. Scratch does a great job of taking abstract concepts and making them easy to integrate and understand. One of the problems teachers in the field of Computer Science face is that it is hard for students to write a program that is interactive and graphical without a great deal of time and coding. Scratch has solved this problem by removing the complexity of graphics programming, and allowing you to focus on the structure and design of computer programs.

I will definately spend more time working with Scratch!

An interesting comment/discussion that emerged during Dr. Li's presentation was childrens fear of failure in school settings. It reminds me of Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk titled "Schools kill creativity", in particular the section titled 'facing the fear of being wrong'


His main point is that our society stigmatizes mistakes and the result of this is that we "educate people out of their creative capacities". I cannot agree more with what Sir Ken has to say, but I am also motivated by the thoughts and research of Marc Prensky and Dr. Qing Li who realize that gaming can be a viable educational resource for our 21st century learners.

P.S. More on Sir. Ken Robinson tomorrow!