Playing with Scratch: the methodology of the co-participatory ludicity design with children

Playing with Scratch: the methodology of the co-participatory ludicity design with children Abstract The “Scratch in childhood” project is developed with kindergarten children (from 4 to 5 years old) and aims to show how Scratch from MIT Media Lab (an application and visual programming language for children) can promote spontaneous social playing of children with the mediated intervention of parents and teachers. The methodology of the co-participatory ludicity design with children supports the project stages, which evolve from the communicative interaction and ludicity promotion to the autonomy and spontaneity of children who play without the intervention of adults. Children were supported by the researchers and the kindergarten teachers, being the Scratch accepted as a support of the educational process. Thus, children were challenged to use the program as a tool to build Scratch projects that are multimedia animations that integrate scenarios, characters, accessories and objects, which are drawing by children or imported to the application (contents already created). Introduction Today, computing devices dominate children daily lives in different contexts, whether at school, home or at free time. The new media are part of their lives and are changing the way they think, interact and learn. In the scope of “Scratch in childhood” project was carried out interventiontraining-experiencing sessions with Scratch programming, which take place at the Kindergarten of “Cooperativa A Torre” in Lisbon and consist of two phases: the first was conducted with 25 children from 5 to 6 years old in a total of 15 sessions from May to July 2010 in the Scratch Club room; the second one, was accomplished with 24 children from 4 to 5 years old in a total of 15 sessions from March to July 2011 in the kindergarten classroom. In 2009, it was also created a set of eleven tutorials in Scratch that are available at http://kids.sapo.pt/scratch/formacao, and characters (“Scratch guardians”) that guide children in the tutorials narratives and during tutorials tasks. These contents helped children in the Scratch intervention-trainingexperiencing sessions. Scratch programming Scratch programming (Fig. 1) allows children to create and share interactive stories, games, music and animations. Through the simple programming tools available in Scratch, children have the possibility to practice their logical thinking and explore their creativity while develop their projects [1]. Methodological framework The methodology of the co-participatory ludicity design with children [2] is a qualitative methodology, which has an ethnographic inspiration and has its foundation in the action-research. This methodology aims to contribute to the co-creation of media literacy skills with children. The iterative process of the co-participatory ludicity design using Scratch programming consists of eight stages (Fig. 2) where the interaction of children is increasingly complex. The programming concepts showed to children start from the simplest (motion, looks and sound) to the more complex (using numbers and coordinates explanation). Patrícia Oliveira /Ph.D, Conceição Lopes Department of Communication and Art, ID+, University of Aveiro Fig 1 / Scratch programming environment. Results: Scratch projects created by chidren In the first phase of the research, the children with 5-6 years old have created a short narrative that illustrates the poetry from Portuguese and Brazilian authors discovered and learned by them in the classroom context. In general, children used the guardians Pópia and Pópio to represent the human figures described in the poems and they have drawn objects and accessories, which were also mentioned in the poems, with strong colours and consistent lines, sometimes filling them with textures (Fig. 3). After creating the graphics composition, children animate the illustration using simple programming commands. On the other hand, in the second phase, the children with 4-5 years old had a different inspiration for the creation of new Scratch projects. In this case, the educational resource was the story of the book “The Secret of the River” by Miguel Sousa Tavares. The story was divided into twelve parts, which were selected by twelve pairs of children who illustrated and animated them in Scratch. As each animation is part of the same story, it was used a single drawing for each character, for this there was a contest between children drawings in order to choose the best characters. In terms of design, the selected characters are brightly coloured, predominantly with warm colours and are filled with solid colours or textures. The scenarios are photographs of a scale model of the village where the story of the book takes place. This composition of different types of graphics does not produce visual noise, in fact all elements are integrated as a whole (Fig.4). The animations made by children incorporate simple commands essentially of motion and appearance. Conclusion Children with the use of Scratch programming can experience their ludicity condition mediated by a computing device. Scratch offers them the possibility to interact socially, create stories scripts, cooperate and share projects, think creatively, discover computer programming, training logical thinking and develop interpersonal relationships. Scratch is an important toy to early childhood education, because improves the social learning of 21st century literacy: read-write-count-programming-play-create, enabling the connection between ludicity-work-study-creativity. References [1] Resnick, M., Maloney, J., Monroy-Hernández, A., Rusk, N., Eastmond, E., Brennan, K., Millner, A., Rosenbaum, E., Silver, J., Silverman, B., and Kafai, Y. (2009). Scratch: programming for all. Commun. ACM 52, 11, pp. 60-67. [2] Lopes, C.; Monteiro, A.; Silva, A. e Oliveira, A. P. (2015). Design de ludicidade coparticipativo com crianças: uma teoria na coconstrução da literacia mediática. In Literacia, Media e Cidadania - Livro de Atas do 3.º Congresso. S. Pereira & M. Toscano (Eds.). Braga: CECS, pp. 110-132. Fig 2 / Iterative process of the co-participatory ludicity design with Scratch programming. Fig 4 / Scratch project of a part from the book “The Secret of the River” by Miguel Sousa Tavares - Manuel (aged 4) and Rodrigo (aged 5). Fig 3 / Scratch project of the poems “Lianor” by Luís de Camões and “A Porta” by Vinicius de Moraes - Mafalda (aged 5) and Inês (aged 5).