How New Tools and New Communities Support Young People as Designers of Interactive Media

Young people are surrounded by interactive media – but they engage with this media primarily as consumers, rather than as producers. In this talk, Brennan describes how access to tools and access to community can support a shift from consumption to production, using the Scratch programming language as an extended case study. Based on interviews and observation, she shares five years of young people’s activities with Scratch, in both formal (K-12 classroom environments) and informal (the Scratch online community) learning environments.

Finally she ends by describing the future of Scratch, providing an overview of the latest version of the Scratch environment, Scratch 2.0.