In this episode, we’re talking to Eric Rosenbaum - mainly about Scratch, which is a block-based visual programming language. But there is so much more he’s involved with, for example Makey Makey, Drawdio or Singing Fingers.
The first line of Eric’s biography says it all - it reads: “I design for creative play”. This could not be more true just look at the array of creative educational projects he was and is involved with.
Foremost, there is Scratch - a block-based visual programming language and online community targeted primarily at children. We have mentioned Scratch many times and finally we’re talking with Eric, wo is currently working with the Scratch Team at MIT Media Lab.
https://kidslab.dev/2020/03/09/scratch-with-eric-rosenbaum/
In this episode, we’re talking to Eric Rosenbaum - mainly about Scratch, which is a block-based visual programming language. But there is so much more he’s involved with, for example Makey Makey, Drawdio or Singing Fingers.
The first line of Eric’s biography says it all - it reads: “I design for creative play”. This could not be more true just look at the array of creative educational projects he was and is involved with.
Foremost, there is Scratch - a block-based visual programming language and online community targeted primarily at children. We have mentioned Scratch many times and finally we’re talking with Eric, wo is currently working with the Scratch Team at MIT Media Lab.
https://kidslab.dev/2020/03/09/scratch-with-eric-rosenbaum/
spk_0: 0:00
the secret to making something the kids fall in love with and come back to is making it have a kind of social meaning, a kind of social context where it's not just the way a Social media site allows you to post something and get likes on it. It's it's actually deeper than that For us. It's We cultivate a community on scratch where kids know that it's safe and that they can trust other kids to be positive and supportive and to feed each other creative energy and ideas.
spk_1: 0:38
All right, welcome to Kids Lap podcast for parents, educators and everybody interested in steam education thing. This episode we're talking to Eric Rosenbaum mainly about scratch, which is a block based visual programming language. But there's so much is involved with, for example, Marky Marky rodeo or saying Fingers thief. First line of Eric's biography says it all. It reads. I designed for creative play. This could not be more true. Just look at the area of creative educational projects he waas and is currently involved with foremost there scratch a block based visual programming language and online community targeted primarily a Children we have mentioned scratch many times, and finally we're talking with. Eric was currently working with the scratch team at M I T Media Lab, another great educational toy. It Eric wasn't wolf ofhis Marky Marky. It's an electronic invention tool and toid that allows users to connect everyday objects to computer programs. Using a circuit board alligator clips and you speak cables, the toy uses closed loop electrical signals to send the computer either a keyboard stroke or a mouse click signal. This simply means that you can hook up a banana to your computer. For example, whenever you touch it, it sends a keystroke, and you can, for example, control of fun. Game with it. Crazy? Yep, but a great way to start learning about electricity, computers and electronics. Eric has also been involved in electron ICS projects. Such a straw audio. The name combines drawing with audio, and if you sold and build it with your kids, you can have fun and learn about electronics in combination with sound at the same time. Or they're singing fingers, which is an iPad app that allows you to experiment with sounds. We could continue listing projects for quite some time, so if you're interested please check out these episodes. Block post at kids Slept out there for the show notes where I'm linking to its website, which is filled with other projects he's involved with. All right. Hi, Eric. It's great to have you on the show. How are you today?
spk_0: 3:04
Doing great. It's it's great to be here with you.
spk_1: 3:07
So, Eric, it looks to me like you've devoted pretty much your entire life to creating fun and educational, sometimes also noisy projects. So what is motivating do each day to create such cool things?
spk_0: 3:19
I just I love making stuff, and I feel very lucky that I've been able to have a professional life where I get to invent and create things, especially for other people, to play this. That's the thing that's so moting. Motivating for me is the chance to build stuff and put it out in the world. Um, and also especially, like, make things that other people use to create stuff. Sometimes things I didn't even imagine.
spk_1: 3:46
So there were a lot of emails going back and forth before this recording, and I think you mentioned that we could even do a little life demo a thing. It was about singing fingers, right?
spk_0: 3:57
Absolutely So, yeah, I love making music and sound projects. I love making weird noises with technology on dso a few years ago. Ah, my friend Jay Silver and I, we came up with this idea of finger painting with sound. It became an IOS app that we call singing fingers. Basically, you can draw on the screen of your phone, but only if you're making a sound with their voice at the same time. So I'll do right now singing fingers. So I just drew this crazies spiraling line and it has colors in it, and the colors depend on the pitch of the sound of my voice. But now I can touch my drawing E o. And it will playback sounds that I made so I can record like little beatbox sounds like, and then I can just touch those e on Duncan. I could make music kind of playing my drunk. It's really fun. And you know, what you're creating is both the drawing and a musical instrument at same time.
spk_1: 5:05
So before we dive into scratch, you've created quite a few other projects. One of them is making making him so What is making make it all about
spk_0: 5:12
making making is about making anything into a key. It's this little circuit board that me and my friend Jay Silver created when we were both graduate students at M. I T Media Lab, and the idea is that you continue to turn your whole world into a construction kit. You can repurpose everyday objects around you and turn them into musical instruments or game controllers or anything else you can imagine. It's, Ah, simple idea, really, Because the little circuit board that you plug in the making, Maki tells the computer that it's a keyboard like the type on, but you get to make your own keys by connecting objects to it with alligator clips. And so, for example, if you take a banana that's a classic Lindy's, they plugged that in to the making Mickey. Then when you touch the banana, the computer thinks you pressed, say, the space bar or the W key or the up there, and you can plug in a whole row of objects. Anything that's even a little bit electrically conductive will work, and then you could make that row of objects into a piano so you could make a piano out of pennies or petunias or puppies, or people play doh or even things that don't start with the letter P. And there's an incredible variety of, um, materials that people have used it with.
spk_1: 6:33
So what are some of the other things people have created? But don't say tomatoes. Now.
spk_0: 6:40
People love making wacky new kinds of game controllers with making making because it frees you from the existing kind of paradigms of something you can. You can make something that you hold in your hand like an existing game controller, and that's a really from project. Make your own shaped gin game controller out of cardboard and then put, say, aluminum foil on it, and then you you can lay out the buttons however you want. We could also make it out of chairs or out of an entire table, or make a game controller the size of an entire wall or a floor or even a whole auditorium full of people. People could be a game, another area that people love to use. Making Nikki for us is new kinds of musical instruments, musical instruments that you wear on your body or that, um, you can play by running back and forth across the room or that you can play by escorting water. And one of the really exciting things that that has happened is that so lots of kids and families and school groups and other kind of creative groups are using making make you to make stuff. And that's really wonderful. And there's also another group, which is professional musicians also using making making. And they tend to make really beautiful videos and those air inspiring everybody else and kind of like raise the the level of possibilities for everybody. So a couple of those that I've seen well recently there's ah, musician named Sean Wasabi is, ah, young electronic musician, and he does these crazy things that I've never seen before. One of them is he made music at a fast food restaurant using the soda dispenser, and so each labor of soda. He puts his cup underneath it, and it plays a different the size of note. He plays a whole melody where he's like making a crazy soda flavor out of root beer and coke and orange soda or whatever. He also plays music on it and and using like the gas pedal and brake pedal of a car is amazing. Yeah,
spk_1: 8:28
and of course, we'll have all these links in the show notes. So just with the kids slept, not deaf.
spk_0: 8:33
Just to mention one other area that I love to see is people doing accessibility projects with making making, so creating new conserve interfaces for music and games. Other things for people with disabilities, for example, limited motor control or motor movement. You can make a custom interface just for that one person's that they can play that one game they wanna play. Um, like a car racing controller mounted on the, um, arm of a wheelchair for a particular kid, that kind of project is really inspired to be as well.
spk_1: 9:02
All right, so let's now dive into scratch. Scratch 101 You are one of the key developers. What is it all about? How would you personally describe scratch?
spk_0: 9:12
Scratch is an online creative community that's used by kids, uh, all over the world to create interactive projects. It's, ah, programming environment where you can create animated stories, interactive art games, simulations, just an incredible variety of things, using code that instead of typing in you Could you construct by snapping together graphical blocks on the screen so it's easier to get started with. And it also includes a paint editor and a sound editor. So you can really put your yourself and what you care about into your project, Um, make images and sounds and music that that are things that you love. And then it's a community to where you can share the project that you make so that other kids can see and interact with comment on and remix your project. So
spk_1: 10:04
how many projects get created each year?
spk_0: 10:06
Scratch has really grown since, uh, we launched the very first version in 2007 and that the community has just continue to grow by leaps and bounds. And so there are millions of kids all over the world and, uh, millions of projects that kids have created and shared on the site there. Now, almost 50 million projects shared by kids on the scratch community.
spk_1: 10:29
Wow. So that's definitely a lot. Would you recommend scratch for a specific age group?
spk_0: 10:35
Yeah. The sweet spot for the scratch community is, uh, well, in the U. S. We refer to it as middle school age, but that's basically like, I don't know, roughly 8 to 12 year old kids. But kids younger than that definitely can get started with it. And then we have a lot of activity of kids that are are older as well, who continue with it. And also, increasingly, there are introductory computer science courses in high school and college. So forget for older people that, um, start with their first assignments using scratch as away toe. Just get interested in learning how to make things using code.
spk_1: 11:14
So then there's also scratched junior. So what? It's a big difference to the normal version.
spk_0: 11:19
Scratched Junior is awesome. It is way simpler. It's designed for kids age 5 to 7, and it works only on tablets. So it's a touch interface, and it's got almost no words in it, so you can use it without being able to read so graphical blocks they used to program instead of having text on them like they do in scratch and scratch. Junior. They just have icons, and you can use it to make beautiful interactive stories and animations, and kids really can express themselves playfully with it. it does not have the same kind of online community because the kids are so young. But, ah, lot off education groups and classrooms around the world are using Scratched Jr
spk_1: 12:06
So do you have an idea? It's mainly using scratch is its code clubs and mostly parents telling the kids about scratch or its scratch really used at schools? And it's mostly introduced by teachers, for example, to the kids.
spk_0: 12:19
I think that the situation has evolved over the years that we initially created scratch in partnership with informal education. Um, folks of people working outside of schools in after school centers and museums, the computer clubhouse network where kids can come to do creative stuff with technology. But then there's just been this gradual, steady rise of schools adopting it, especially in the past few years, when there's been a very rapid rise of curriculum around coding. We are now working on better ways that the scratch team can support our partners in schools, on also governments that are developing curricula because that's a really powerful place for us to have an impact as it grows.
spk_1: 13:07
So does this mean tools like classroom management, for example,
spk_0: 13:11
the things that were starting to think about more now than we have in the past are professional development and curriculum development. So building up a capacity where we teach people to teach teachers and building up um, materials the teachers can use to run their own creative activities in classrooms. One of the challenges that we face is that scratch is fundamentally a creative medium. It's not a puzzle or a gain or a quiz, obviously. And so the desired outcome when you have a group of kids working and scratches that they all do or make something different and that they all maybe learn something different from each other. And so it's a different way of thinking about, um, how to manage a classroom activity that many educational technology is kind of lead you towards. And so we have this challenge of conveying our philosophy of creative learning along with the tool itself. What are
spk_1: 14:15
some off the cool new features in scratch? Three. If you remember correctly, it came out generally to found 19 right?
spk_0: 14:21
That's right. At the beginning of 2019 we launched scratch through the this totally rewritten version of scratch. It was a really exciting moment where we're able to, um, both make it completely backwards compatible. So all the millions of pre existing scratch projects still worked the same as before, but also add some totally new capabilities. So one of the things that we care a lot about is just reaching kids where they are. That means on the devices and platforms that they use every day. And so scratch didn't work before on, um, tablets. And so now you can run it in the browser on Android and IOS tablets. But we also recently have launched a native, um, chrome os and Android Um, app. First scratch. That's one big change. Another big changes wth e extensions to scratch and particularly excited about that, because that's something that I've been heavily involved with. Building, designing and making the new extensions on DSO extension to scratch adds new blocks to the language,
spk_1: 15:26
so I guess we should not explore some of the extensions off scratch. I've seen there are some physical extensions like you can connect, for example, that Maki Maki or the microbe it on there's a non physical one. So let's maybe start off the non physical ones, such like uh, the webcam, for example. What can you do with video sensing, for example?
spk_0: 15:45
So video sensing is really fun? Um, a little known fact That's actually a feature that was in scratch, too. We moved it into an extension in scratch. Three, because a lot of people didn't know about it. It's a war visibility. What it does is it opens up a live feed from the camera on the stage of scratch. So all of your, um, sprites, the animated characters that you create now our co existing with the live feed from the camera and each of the sprites on the stage can detect motion in the camera feeds. So basically, you can make, you know a row of balloons, and each of them has code that just says when I sense motion pop and then you can wave your end to make old, uh, row of balloons one at a time. It's a way to interact with your scratch project, not just with the mouse and keyboard, but potentially with your whole body or even with a whole whole group of folks jumping around
spk_1: 16:36
so really like that. Because this way, you are kind of extending the scratch projects outside of the screen. So you know you can have to. You have to move in front of the screen to make it interact and do something. I really liked that. Very cool. Yeah, let's now discuss some off the physical extensions, such as connecting to Maki Maki or the microbe. It's what's cool about these
spk_0: 16:58
That's super fun. So it's another way to connect. Scratch out to the to the physical world. The monkey make extensions kind of funny because the making making Because it acts like a keyboard, it already works with the existing scratch blocks that detect what is oppressed. We add an extension just to make it more visible that, you know, beautiful kind of peanut butter and jelly combination of making, making scratch. They work so well together. We wanted to make sure people know about that on. Then it was a chance to add another weird new block that that detects sequences of keys press so you can make a secret code. So I if you're an old school video gamer, you might remember the Konami Code where you press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right toe, unlock a secret power. And that block lets kids make that, uh, in their own games. They can add secret codes. Um, the microbe. It is a wonderful platform made by the BBC. It's a little circuit board with my her controller and smelly teas and some sensors and buttons on their many ways to program that thing. But when you added support for it to scratch that you can use the microbe it, for example, as a game controller. So you can tilt your microbe it left and right, and fly your spaceship on your scratch screen or any of a number of other kind of, um, playful ways that you can. For example, you could touch your head and make a musical instrument that you play by bopping years head around or press the buttons in order to advance in animation.
spk_1: 18:26
So scratch is definitely one off those educational platforms under Internet debts, YSL used a lot by kids, and kids come back to it very often, right, so that kind of addicted to scratch. So I want to ask you what is important when you design in educational tool or toy or service for the kids actually come back and really use it not just once, but on a regular basis. I
spk_0: 18:53
think the secret, too. Making something the kids fall in love with and come back to is making it have a kind of social meaning, a kind of social context where it's not just the way a Social media site allows you to post something and get likes on it. It's it's actually deeper than that For us. It's We cultivate a community on scratch where kids know that it's safe and that they can trust other kids to be positive and supportive and to feed each other creative energy and ideas. Um, and that's something that's not new new in the latest version of Scratched really something that we've been developing and growing since the very first version scratch in 2007 where it launched with with the very first community site and right away kids started creating and collaborating together. There's a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes. We have ah, dedicated staff of moderators who worked very hard to keep all of the activity, not just like clean and free of obscenities and other kinds of toxic behavior, but really positive and supportive and engaged. And they do a ton of work to help the kids connect with each other and and to create new activities that help them collaborate.
spk_1: 20:17
Yes. Just before the show, I checked out some of the project and saw some comments. Were kids mentioned some location and their full name, for example? And then there was another comment by a moderator that pointed out. It's unsafe to mention that and any God kind of moderated. And I guess this is awesome because the kids this way also learn about online safety. For example. Very nice.
spk_0: 20:39
Yes. Yeah, we worked very hard on the safety and positivity of the community,
spk_1: 20:45
so it looks like there's a huge team behind it. Can you give us some numbers?
spk_0: 20:50
So the scratch team as a whole is on the order of 40 people right now, and about a dozen of those people are moderators.
spk_1: 20:59
So, Eric, you are one of the key developers off the scratch project and your deep down in the coat. Um, I'm not gonna ask you about a detailed road map for the future, but is there something you can share about the future of scratch, Maybe some extensions coming to scratch or something else.
spk_0: 21:15
Yeah, well, of course, I don't want to make any promises, but I can tell you about some of the experiments that we're doing now. Um, so I mentioned that scratch has this ability to be extended. You could make extensions that add new blocks. I've done ah number of kind of speculative experiments in making extensions for things like, um, Well, we worked as a team on things like speech recognition, on using machine learning, to recognise objects or even to make an extension that you can teach to classify different visual scenes. So it's like a wedding and engaged. We're deeply with machine learning. We've done experiments with new ways to synthesize sound, to simulate physics. There's tons of these experiments, So we're working now on a way to decide which of them you know, will push forward and try to get out in the world. Another related project is how to help other people make their own extensions for scratch. Um, another area that I'm working on now with a with a team here is a project that we're calling. Bring yourself into scratch. And so that's about in several different ways. Helping kids express who they are, their identity in there, scratch projects. And we're still in the phase of kind of formulating what that will look like. But some of the ideas include, um, making easier in our Paint editor, the drawing tool to choose colors that represent different skin tones around the world. Other area is helping kids when they join the community to express who they are through an avatar on their profile or getting to know other kids through what we call the welcoming committee. We have a lot of ideas, and there's only so many things that we can actually bring out in the world because we have a very slow, careful, deliberative, deliberative process as we design and engineer everything. But we care deeply about helping kids express who they are.
spk_1: 23:21
That's very cool. I think I'm really looking forward to that. I extension that might help me to create my own A I'm all and then use it within scratch. Sounds very cool to me. So, Eric, thank you so much for this interview. It was great to have you on the show. It's just something you coming out please let me know. And at some point, maybe also, please come again to the kids left class. Thank you so much. In this episode, we explore the visual programming language stretched directly with one off the key people. Eric Rose, inbound from the M I T Media Lab. Now is the right time to head over. The kids left the death to check out the show notes of all the links. And, of course, don't forget to subscribe with one of the subscription buttons. Again, kids, let the death. That's also the place to go to if you want to leave some feedback in the next episode. We're talking to Pen Holland and Sarah Wise, and a project remaining discussing is called Peter to Seed Eater. It's an exciting project around biology, math and computer science.