Do It Yourself – SCRATCH

SIT Innovation Community held a gathering presenting SCRATCH – a free and extremely user-friendly program developed at MIT's Media Lab that enables users to create interactive games and video clips with ease.

By Eleanor Weisbrot, second year student of the Sammy Ofer School of Communications

How can children create interactive media so as not to be only consumers of it? What distinguishes study aids in the 21st century? Parents and children, students and lecturers experienced, firsthand, an answer to these questions in the most recent gathering of the SIT Innovation Community, which took place last Thursday at IDC Herzliya. The term innovation is often believed to intimidate companies and educational institutions, yet innovative learning is an important key to education in the 21st century. The SCRATCH program makes the experience of studying simple and enjoyable.

The session included hands-on use of the SCRATCH program, developed at MIT's Media Lab. The program, which has a graphical programming language, enables even those of us who are not "computer geniuses" to create

interactive video clips, presentations, and games with ease.

Dr. Oren Zuckerman, a graduate of MIT's Media Lab and head of the Interactive Media Program at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications, presented the program and offered users tips. Dr. Zuckerman brought the parents and the children together for a fascinating lecture about the development and design of the program's interface, users' impressions of the program, the new 21st century philosophy of learning, and the file sharing community found at the global SCRATCH website. Furthermore, Dr. Zuckerman highlighted the manner in which the culture of participation has been changing the media world.

Present at the meeting were members of SIT Innovation Community (senior

managers, consultants and academics) and their children over the age of 10 who wanted to check out the program for themselves. Students majoring in Interactive Communications along with SIT instructors were present at the gathering in order to assist Dr. Oren Zuckerman. They instructed and coached the users on ways to utilize the program's innovative features and interactive learning tools and on ways to easily create interactive media, all of which are meant to encourage curiosity and creativity.

During the second part of the evening, while Dr. Zuckerman was lecturing the parents about the program and internet participatory culture, the children enjoyed special activities led by Avishai Litvak, an actor and artist of the Mayumana group.

Hebrew SCRATCH website:

http://www.scratch.org.il/

Official MIT SCRATCH website:

http://scratch.mit.edu/