Ricarose Roque
art and philosophy of John Maeda, who was then a professor at the MIT Media Lab. What I found so compelling was how the art featured in the book was created through coding. By coding patterns to draw, transform, and cross the screen in whichever sequence I desired, I found I could be as or even more expressive than I had been with pencils, markers, and paper. And as I became more curious and began to look up resources online, I found others who had similar interests, people who I could look up to and also learn from. They shared their work and their code, which I examined and remixed myself. For me, learning to code was not the prime
motivator, but rather, a means for me to pursue my interest in new ways. Today, we see young people doing just this with coding in the Scratch online community. Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu) is a programming language in which people can create their own interactive media such as stories, art, and games (Resnick et al, 2009). Developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten research group directed by Mitchel Resnick at the MIT Media Lab, Scratch has become a dynamic community since it launched in 2007. Young people from all over the world, who are primarily between the ages of 8 and 16, have created and shared over 6 million projects. For example, one young member of the Scratch online community with the username NightCat wanted a way to animate her artwork featuring cats. Not just ordinary cats, but cats inspired by Erin Hunter’s Warrior Cats book series. When she began sharing her projects, she started getting comments from other Scratchers complimenting her art and animation. Soon people started asking her to share how she created her cats and animations, and she created tutorial projects showing her process step by step.
At the same time, she connected with a group of Scratchers who also loved the Warrior Cats series. Together, they created a gallery of projects on the Scratch website that featured their different adaptations of characters from the series. They also role-played their cat characters in the gallery comments, improvising stories about the characters in their imagined world.
NightCat’s experiences are just one of the many ways young people have created and connected with others in the community. Scratchers have created a diverse range of projects that include music videos visually expressing popular music, interactive holiday cards for their friends and family, musical instruments, informational projects raising awareness about animal testing, biology simulations, newspapers based on their social network,
slideshows of their favorite things, and adaptations of popular mobile games. Additionally, they have connected to each other in many ways, including discussing projects in the forums, leaving constructive comments about other’s work, and building on ideas by remixing pre-existing projects. Some have even formed collaborative groups to create more sophisticated projects that go beyond what one person could have done on their own.
The experiences of these Scratchers as well as my own personal experience illustrate how pursuing what you care about can be both an entry point into coding as well as a reason to learn to code. And when people engage in coding to design, build, and express what they care about, what emerges will represent their diverse interests, needs, and backgrounds.
With this in mind, I return to my earlier questions: Why would someone want to learn to code? And how can coding be personally meaningful to everyone — when everyone comes from different backgrounds, ages, and interests? The reasons I described
earlier (access to job opportunities, contributing to economic competitiveness, and more importantly, engaging in powerful learning opportunities that have use beyond computing contexts) are all valuable motivations to learn to code. I do not intend to dismiss them in this essay. Rather, I mean to highlight another reason that is both a motivation and an approach to engage a variety of people in personally meaningful ways: leveraging coding to express their creativity and invent things that connects to their lives. Everybody should have such abilities to get their voice and ideas out in the world. And opportunities with learning and personal trajectories will follow.
To make coding meaningful, we need to make coding personal and social. It needs to enable people to create and express their experiences, ideas, and interests. By making coding social, we allow people to connect to others with similar interests — people who can help spark ideas, give feedback, share resources, or even collaborate on the project. When coding is personal and social, people will have their own motivations and social contexts to learn and sustain their engagement. More importantly, people can express their creative potential and connect with communities through shared interests, historical traditions, and cultural identities. As we continue discussions about the nature of digital literacy, these are abilities and capacities that will enable people to participate in and contribute their voices and innovations to a rapidly changing digital society.
References / Resources / Links
Brennan, K., & Resnick, M. (2012). New frameworks for studying and assessing the development of computational thinking. Presented at the American Education Researchers Association, Vancouver, Canada.
Resnick, M., Silverman, B., Kafai, Y., Maloney, J., Monroy- Hernández, A., Rusk, N., Eastmond, E., Brennan, K., Millner, A., Rosenbaum, E., & Silver, J. (2009). Scratch: Programming for all. Communications of the ACM, 52, 60. Rushkoff, D. (2011). Program or be programmed: Ten commands for the digital age. Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press.
Wing, J. M. (2006). Computational thinking. Communications of the ACM, 49(3), 33–35.
Tables and chairs, markers and glue, the slicing afternoon light of Cambridge in early Spring — there’s a hush fallen at NuVu Studio, an innovation hub for young people in Central Square, bracketed by the hum of a laser printer and the snick, snick, snick of scissors. Teens cluster here and there beneath the high ceilings, some sitting at tables, other propped on hands and knees on the floor, delicately constructing collages from hundreds of printed photographs. The images they’re piecing together chart the everyday weirdness of the city: scattered litter, cracked walls and sodden streets, a gallery of tired and beautifully broken faces. Patiently, with X-ACTO blades and glue, they’re arranging these pictures together into expressive portraits of life in Central Square — maps of another kind, charting the evanescent geography of danger and curiosity in the city.
A few weeks earlier, in air-conditioned spaces far away in the sunny, broiling-hot, metropolitan Emirate of Abu Dhabi, another clutch of young people had labored over maps of danger of their own. Students at New York University’s (NYU) Abu Dhabi campus, representing a global cohort of incoming freshmen, used digital imagery to express a wide-ranging geography of danger: bodies of animals and computer viruses, discarded shoes and cigarette packs, the charged prospect of a kiss. Having just arrived from around the world, these students brought a variety of ideas of danger (and dangerous ideas) to a new and different place, one with its own highly specific notions of danger, risk, and wrong. Their work, in the form of digital files printed and distributed, enlivened the discussion that later took place in chilly Massachusetts.
These interwoven acts of making and encountering took place in the context of Media Art Knowledge Engaged (MAKE), a project fostered by a group of artists and researchers affiliated with Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a host of global partners, who together created a series of workshops to explore themes such as copyright laws, privacy, danger, and gender equality. Their interest in fostering this set of encounters was piqued during the planning phase of the Digitally Connected symposium, which unfolded at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society over the course of the academic year 2013-14. The symposium’s goal was a comprehensive one: “to map and explore the global state of relevant research and practice, share and discuss insights and ideas from the developing and industrialized world, and encourage collaboration between participants across regions and continents.” (www. digitallyconnected.org) In the fall of 2013, several of us (including the authors of this essay) started thinking about ways to bring those goals to life in an engaged way, collaborating with young people around the world by employing art, media, and digital skills.
In dialogue with the symposium’s organizers, a group came together around the idea of shaping a series of workshops, hosted by youth arts and media programs in the Boston area in partnership with sites around the world. The coordinating team included the following: Matthew Battles (metaLAB), Dalida Maria Benfield (Berkman Center); Giuliana Cucinelli (MIT); Tim Davies (Berkman Center); Primavera de Filippi (Berkman Center); Sarah Newman
(metaLAB); and Luca Simeone (metaLAB). Meeting frequently throughout the academic year, this group collectively forged a vocabulary for collaborative