w00t! A New Curriculum for Creative Computing

ScratchEd Team Makes Good With Top-Notch Curriculum Guide

Remember my infatuation back in early 2010 with Scratch, the open source programming language developed by Mitchel Resnick at MIT? And Apple’s upsetting decision to pull the Scratch reader from its app store, soon afterwards? I was worried, but things have been in good hands.

The ScratchEd team at HGSE has been hard at work, in collaboration with people at the Education Development Center’s Center for Children & Technology, and the MIT Media Lab, developing a comprehensive and inspiring curriculum guide for teaching creative computing and the Scratch language.

“The activities are designed to support familiarity and increasing fluency with computational creativity and computational thinking. In particular, the activities encourage exploration of key computational thinking concepts (sequence, loops, parallelism, events, conditionals, operators, data) and key computational thinking practices (experimenting and iterating, testing and debugging, reusing and remixing, abstracting and modularizing).”

It’s really excellent work. A very polished, easy to use, and well designed upgrade of the original version.

You can access the 150-page pdf guide here.