Ten winners snag $1.7M total in digital competition

The MacArthur Foundation grants fund projects is an annual competition to inspire and find new ways to use digital media to support learning. This is the third year of the competition and 10 projects are selected each year sharing $1.7 million dollars. The article stated that the competition was announced in collaboration with President Obama’s “Educate to Innovate” initiative, challenging designers, inventors, entrepreneurs, and researchers to create education technology “learning labs” for the 21st century, with digital environments that promote building and tinkering in new and innovative ways.


The winners will use games, mobile phone applications, virtual worlds, and social networks to advance learning in the 21st century, the foundation said. Today’s students interact with other students around the world online, in social networks and video games and according to Connie Yowell, the foundation’s director “the competition helps them to identify and nurture the creation of learning environments that are relevant for kids today and will prepare them for a 21st-century workforce.”

Some of this year’s winners:

1. Click! The Online Spy School: Engaging girls in STEM activities, peer networking and gaming
• Combines social networking with a virtual laboratory for teen girls featuring a fictional spy school
2. ECOBUGS
• This game is for learners ages 7 to 11, that encourage their interest in the environment as they explore their surroundings to create, collect, and monitor the health of virtual “bug” species
3. Fab@School: A digital Fabrication Laboratory for the Classroom
• Introduces K-12 students to the power of mathematical analysis and modeling, digital fabrication, and engineering by encouraging imaginative and collaborative experimentation, invention, design, and creation.
4. Hole-in-the-Wall: Activity Based e-learning for Improving Elementary Education in India\
• The e-learning bridges the digital divide by reaching underserved youth in the developing world by installing over 700 internet enabled public Playground Learning Stations across India, Bhutan, Cambodia and Africa. The games promote experiential learning mapped to the prescribed primary curriculum across various subjects.
5. Mobile Action Lab: Programming Apps for Collaborative Community Change
• These labs network emerging entrepreneurs, social change agents, and top technologist with Oakland-based youth participants who propose, develop, and market online and mobile apps.
6. Conservation Connection: From the West Side to the West Pacific
• This project engaged American youth from the West Side of Chicago and Fijian youth in the West Pacific in stewardship of Fijian coral reefs through direct involvement in the scientific process
7. MetroVoice: About/IN/
• Youth in Los Angeles collaborate to write and produce videos and TV screen banners that explore aspects of their families, blocks, streets, and neighborhoods. These messages are then transmitted on TV screens on LA Metro buses transforming the buses into mobile learning labs.
8. Nox No More: Connecting travel logs with simulation, gaming and environmental education
• This online gave personalizes environmental education by linking learning to a player’s personal life to illustrate the positive impact of simple, everyday choices to save the planet from carbon emissions by providing the analysis of potential fuel savings by alternative transportation choices

To access the winners of this year’s competition and the past two years please go to:
http://www.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7Bb0386ce3-8b29-4162-8098-e466fb856794%7D/INFO-DMLCOMP.PDF

One of last year’s winners was Scratch & Share: Collaborating with Youth to Develop the Next Generation of Creative Software that won the BEST IN CLASS: Design. This winner created Scratch & Share as a way to enlist youth and teen online community members as active development partners, and allows them to share projects across mobile platforms, to integrate them into social media including Facebook and Twitter, and to remix them more seamlessly.


This school year our school system introduced Scratch to our students and I was able to watch one fourth grade class using Scratch to create interactive characters. The teacher said the students really enjoyed working with the program. I look forward to hearing from the teacher next school year as the students continue to work with Scratch creating interactive stories, games, music and art.

To read the entire article:
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/05/21/ten-winners-snag-1-7m-total-in-digital-competition/

To learn more about Scratch:
http://scratch.mit.edu/

Programming Without Learning Code.....

How many of you had to learn a Programming language going through school? Whether it was Basic, Pascal, Cobol, C+, C++, Visual Basic, etc., etc. Did you really like reading through lines and lines of code to figure out where a problem was so. How many times did you go cross-eyed looking at the pages and pages of code. I know there were a few times I did and I bet you would have to agree with me.

So what is my point. What if I told you that gone are the days of learning code just to program a stick figure to walk across the screen... like I did on an Apple IIe back in 1986. So now I show my age. The good thing is that students today do not have to worry about learning to program by entering in lines and lines of code. This will surely allow a younger student base to get into programming with a lower barrier to entry.

What would you say if I told you that students as young as 8 are learning how to program. How is this possible you may be asking? They are using a program called Scratch which was developed by faculty and students of MIT's Media Lab.



The great thing is that students are learning how to program without having to learn a programming language. This program offers all the commands in nice neat blocks that the students can just drag, drop and connect them together, "like Lego’s®,"to make the actions take place on the screen. The software is a great tool to get young female students excited about working with computers and programming which has historically been a male dominated profession.

Scratch teaches your students higher order thinking and problem solving skills. It provides your students with the foundations of learning mathematical concepts in a fun and easy way. Whether a student is a right or left brain thinker they will easily be able to create programs in Scratch. One thing that I like and is a great benefit is that students get instant gratification because they can see the evolution of the program as they are creating it.

The Scratch website also allows your students an outlet for others to see their work. The site is set up so that the teacher or student can learn how to use the software through the detailed Support link which includes video and pdf tutorials. There are also a number of other videos demonstrating how to perform certain tasks with Scratch as well as general tutorials for the beginning to advanced user on both TeacherTube an YouTube. A student, or teacher, can Share their program, or project, to the website an others can see it, comment on it, share it, download it, remix it, and re-upload it.

Take a look for yourself and see how easy it is to create a program without ever learning any type of programming language.

video provided by: MIT University Media Lab