Designing Creative Online Communities for Kids
In this presentation I will tell the story of the Scratch Online Community, a website where kids from around the world learn to program, share, and remix their own video games and animations. Today, the community has more than one million members, and two million projects. I will describe the design decisions, experiments, successes, and failures, that went into building and supporting this online community, and present a framework for the design of systems that support social creativity. I will end by connecting this framework to the social components of Kodu, a new programming language for kids. *The Scratch Online Community is a project I created as part of my work at the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Kodu is developed by FUSE Labs at Microsoft Research.
Presenters
Post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. He is the creator of the Scratch Online Community, a website where young people create, share, and remix their animations and video games. His research on online collaboration has examined issues ranging from remix culture, copyright, and, more recently, social media in wartime. His work has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, Wired, and has received awards from Ars Electronica, andthe MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition. He was a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab and holds a B.S. in computer engineering form Tec de Monterrey in Mexico.
Monday, March 12
