Unit 3

Stories

THE "BIG IDEA"

Building on other people’s work has been a longstanding practice in programming, and has only been amplified by network technologies that provide access to a wide range of other people’s work. An important goal of creative computing is to support connections between learners through reusing and remixing. The Scratch authoring environment and online community can support young designers in this key computational practice by helping them find ideas and code to build upon, enabling them to create more complex projects than they could have created on their own.

The activities in this unit offer initial ideas and strategies for cultivating a culture that supports reusing and remixing. How can you further support sharing and connecting?

In the introduction to his doctoral dissertation exploring remix culture, Andres Monroy-Hernandez (the lead designer of the initial version of the Scratch online community) included three quotes:

We are like dwarfs standing upon the shoulders of giants, and so able to see more and see farther than the ancients.

Bernard of Chartres, circa 1130

A dwarf on a giant’s shoulders sees farther of the two.

George Herbert, 1651

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Isaac Newton, 1676

Learning Objectives - Students will:

gain familiarity in and build understandings of the benefits of reusing and remixing while designing
develop greater fluency with computational concepts (events and parallelism) and practices (experimenting and iterating, testing and debugging, reusing and remixing)
explore computational creation within the genre of stories by designing collaborative narratives

NOTES

Reusing and remixing support the development of critical code-reading capacities and provoke important questions about ownership and authorship. Consider different strategies for how you might facilitate, discuss, and assess cooperative and collaborative work.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

This unit focuses on helping students develop their storytelling and remixing abilities through a variety of hands-on and off-computer design activities, providing opportunities for students to work collaboratively and build on the creative work of others.

Building on initial experiences from Unit 2, the activities in this unit are designed to help students develop deeper fluency in the computational concepts of events and parallelism and the computational practices of experimenting and iterating and reusing and remixing. Each capacity-building activity is designed to help students build up storytelling projects by discovering new blocks and methods for programming interactions between sprites and backdrops, culminating in a creative story project.

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