Scratch @ MIT 2016

I was at my first Scratch Conference at MIT Media Lab last week (#ScratchMIT2016). It was fantastic!  I met so many awesome Scratchers, educators, researchers, developers and enthusiasts.  It was wonderful, inspiring…  “I came for the workshops and stayed for the community.”

I met the awesome Scratcher Bubble103 and her mom the very first evening and didn’t even know I was meeting a Scratch rockstar.  I met people from all around the globe and had great conversations in between keynotes and workshops and during breakfast and lunch breaks. I have made so many connections, it is quite awesome.  The Scratch team is brilliant, kind and adorable.

Dinner was quite fun, too.

Here are some take-aways from the conference that I hope to implement during the (fast approaching) school year.

• read Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms
• work on parent involvement plan – the keynote about Pathways to Participation helped me understand that I need to support students beyond the school environment.
• more collaboration with the art teacher.  This is the year when art and math and code will collide!  I’m going to introduce Beetle Blocks and the watercolorbot.  From Art Alive there was the interacting with art using Scratch and MakeyMakey piece that we might delve into. I hope we’ll do more Scratch animation, too.  STEAM on.
• introduce the development of cheat codes to help debug Scratch at Code Club.  Rik Cross’ workshop Practical Debugging in Scratch  was super informative. Students will enjoy the idea as well.
  

  Photo from a @Raspberry_Pi tweet

• Scratch Jr and the Writer’s Workshop in 1st grade. Scratch Jr has come along way from the first time I saw it and I’m excited about it again. I already have a homeroom assignment with 1st grade teacher who’s tech savvy so this will not need a big sell.
• Mathematical Simulations in Scratch.  I know my students are NOT high school math level students but I liked the way Patrick Honner was able to embrace the tools the students knew (Scratch) to work on real math problems.  I’d like to try some math modeling in Scratch -like the Monte Carlo method.  I’m going to have to see what comes up in 4th grade math class and the Math Forum Problems of the Week and see if anything looks like a good candidate to model using Scratch.
• Continue to develop this community. Now that I’ve met all of these people I want to keep in touch whether on the internets (Twitter, Facebook) or at a ScratchEd meet-up.  I am definitely thinking about visiting Mags in Ireland.  Who knows, maybe there’ll be a Scratch conference in the UK or Europe next year.

 

 

This all looks doable and like hard fun.

(Note: there are things I will have to get, too- embroidery machine for TurtleStitch, 3-d printer for Beetle Blocks, more Makey Makey‘s.)

Scratch On!

 

Beetle Blocks

Today I am heading to Boston for  Scratch @MIT 2016 Conference. I’m super excited and will blog more about it later.  Last month I had to choose which Thursday workshops to attend and sign up for 2 (when I really, really, wanted to go to 4 or more). One session that I decided not to go, unfortunately, to was a session about Beetle Blocks.

Beetle Blocks example “Bracelet” with code blocks

Instead I have spent the last 4 weeks investigating this 3d block-based browser-run software on my own to see what it is about.

Beetle Blocks is a graphical blocks-based programming environment for 3D design and fabrication.

Use code to control a beetle that can place 3D shapes and extrude its path as a tube. Then make a 3D print!

So Beetle Blocks is like the old Turtle Logo Turtle Paths except with three dimensions. Right-turn, Left-turn become “rotate z” and you can draw lines or extrude 3d tubes, etc.

It definitely had me making my hands into coordinates and thinking in yaw, pitch and roll. Almost had to break out the linear algebra, too.  But mostly I was experimenting with the code and making interesting (sometimes weird) designs.  I don’t claim to understand all of the geometry of how it works.  I spent a long time trying to draw a tetrahedron.  In Turtle logo one of first things to draw (after a square) is a triangle, so I thought 3-d triangle = tetrahedron. I struggled to get the triangles to match up. My husband helped me once he explained that I’d have to calculate the dihedral angle to draw it.

3-d extruded tetrahedron edges

Then rotate and repeat (that part I know how to do).

That won’t be something 3rd or 4th graders will be doing. So what can they do with Beetle Blocks?

So I checked out the Pratt’s Young Scholar Institute to see what Duks Koshitz did with his students.  They coded a letter of their name and made it a block and then did some designs.  I could see that in math class when learning about translation, rotation, and proportion or scale of shapes.  So I tried that out.

Rotation of the letter P

I played with scale as well and then 3-d printed it.

Now that may be a project that my students could do.  Our school doesn’t have a 3-d printer yet, but I’m working on that.

This reminded me of the MathCats 15 word logo challenge from way back, so I went to see if I could recreate some of those logo codes to beetleblocks.  I also wanted to try 2-d printing on the Watercolorbot which I saw they had experimented with in the Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio post.

Example from Math Cats Logo challenge

Now in Beetle Blocks code

Watercolorbot with pen print

No “for loop” equivalent (that I saw) in beetleblocks but I created a size variable and decreased it in the outer loop. Beetleblocks does have trigonometry functions as in the example below. Again I used a count variable and incremented it in a while loop (“repeat until”) to mimic the Logo “for-loop”.

Another MathCats example in Beetle Blocks code.

The Simple Flower design I was able to 3-d and 2-d print with good success. It worked better in pen than with the watercolor brush.

In conclusion, I like Beetleblocks. I want to show it to my math students.  I want to collaborate with the art teacher and bring my watercolorbot to school and play with code and make designs and math art with students and see what happens.

I am hoping to meet up with Eric Rosenbaum, one of the creators of Beetleblocks, perhaps before or after his workshop or some time during the conference.  I’m bringing my prints to share.  Off I go.

Coded with Beetle Blocks then 3-d printed

Coded with Beetle Blocks then printed on a watercolorbot