Making Games from Scratch at MIT

After writing about Game Maker the other day, and how it’s useful for introducing kids to programming, I found Scratch over at MIT. Scratch is an NSF funded project, designed for after school programs, and is freely available for downloading. The principal investigators are Mitchel Resnick and John Maeda over at MIT Media Lab, and Yasmin Kafai over at UCLA.

Scratch is an easy to use programming language that allows children and adults to develop a variety of fun applications, not just games. The apps can then be posted on the web for anybody to play with; a variety of submissions are up on the Scratch site.

A number of papers have been written about Scratch, which are listed here. My favorite is What video game making can teach us about learning and literacy: Alternative pathways into participatory cultures by Kylie Peppler and Yasmin Kafai. This paper will be presented at the DiGRA Conference in Japan later this year.

References

Peppler, K. A. & Kafai, Y. B. (2007). What video game making can teach us about learning and literacy: Alternative pathways into participatory cultures. Paper to be presented at the Digital International Games Research Association meeting in Tokyo, Japan. [Online]. Available: http://scratch.mit.edu/files/DiGRA07_games_kafai.pdf

categories DIGRA, Educational Conferences, Game Discussion, Game Studies, Game Writing, MIT, Making Video Games, Serious Games, Video Game Research, Web 2.0 | John Rice | datetime July 4, 2007 11:24 pm

No Comments

  • By Kathy Larason, July 16, 2007 @ 1:39 pm

    If you just located Scrtch, have you found Alice from Carnegie Mellon?

    “Alice v2.0 is the next major version of the Alice 3D Authoring system, from the Stage3 Research Group at Carnegie Mellon University. It has been completely rewritten from scratch over the past few years.

    The focus of the Alice project is now to provide the best possible first exposure to programming for students ranging from middle schoolers to college students.

  • By John Rice, July 16, 2007 @ 1:50 pm

    Thanks for the tip, Kathy!
    JR

Other Links to this Post

  1. Welcome to Video Game High « Educational Games Blog — July 10, 2007 @ 1:36 pm

  2. Programming with Alice at Carnegie Mellon « Educational Games Blog — July 17, 2007 @ 11:39 am

  3. Academic Achievement Through Game Development « Educational Games Research — November 1, 2007 @ 6:53 pm

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