All posts by Michael Badger

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Scratch 2.0

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Scratch 2.0 features support for mobile devices, social media, group authoring, and web-based remixing.

Too bad Scratch 2.0 doesn’t exist yet. However, if the MIT team wins the Digital Media and Learning competition, those are the proposed features for the next generation of Scratch.

Andres Monroy-Hernandez from the Scratch team talks about the award in a forum post, here. The text of the competition submissoin at Digital Media and Learning is here: http://dmlcompetition.net/pligg/story.php?title=241.

Scratch How-to

Run Scratch from Flash Drives

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Do you need to overcome security restrictions in your computer lab that prevent you from installing Scratch onto the workstations? Or maybe, you always want to ensure you have access to a working installation of Scratch.

Thankfully, Scratch will run on a usb flash drive and the Scratch download page provides a zip file that you can extract right onto the drive. You’ll need to look carefully for the link to the zip file. It’s buried in body copy.

Mac Users can install the dmg file to your flash drive.

Download the zip file and extract it to your flash drive. By default, you’ll extract the files to a Scratch folder on the flash drive.

To open Scratch go your USB drive , open the Scratch folder, and double click on the scratch.exe file.

Add Scratch to PortableApps

PortableApps.com provides a convenient way for users to run many popular open source applications, such as OpenOffice.Org and Firefox from a flash drive. The suite provides a menu of applications when you click on the PortableApps.com icon in the Windows System Tray.

While the applications available directly from http://www.PortableApps.com have their own installers, adding Scratch to the Portable Apps menu is as simple as moving the Scratch program files to the right folder on the flash drive.

The PortableApps suite creates a PortableApps folder on the root of the flash drive with all the applications listed in a subfolder of the PortableApps folder.
To make Scratch appear on the menu, extract the Scratch program files to the PortableApps folder; for example, E:\PortableApps\Scratch.

To make the PortableApps menu display the Scratch icon, open the PortableApps menu then select Options > Refresh App Icons.

That’s a quick little hack. Anyone up for creating a real portable app installer, which would optimize Scratch for the flash drive?

This information adapted and reposted from chapter 2 of Scratch 1.4 Beginner’s Guide.

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Where have all the Geeks Gone?

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I often hear people opine about how today’s youth are wired at birth, but are they fluent? According to the Computer Research Association, enrollment in U.S. based computer science degrees is down 46% between 2003 and 2006.

The question becomes what are we going to do about it because so much of our future personal, professional, and national security depends on having competent technologists.

From the Wired story Darpa: U.S. Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk:

Darpa’s now hoping someone, somewhere, can come up with a way to make future philosophy majors change course. And they want to get ‘em while they’re young: Darpa insists that programs be “targeted to middle and high school students, and include methods “to maintain a positive, long-term presence in a student’s education.”

A long-term presence that includes evenings and weekends. Rather than incorporate computer-based activities into academics, Darpa wants the programs to be extracurricular, “perhaps as an after school activity, weekend, or summer event.”

Darpa is a U.S. Pentagon research group that has an obvious concern for U.S. security, and training 21st century geeks is a large part of our future security. This sounds like a perfect call to arms for Scratch or programs like Scratch that aim to make young people creators instead of raw consumers.

More importantly, Darpa wants buy-in beyond academics. It’s not that formal education isn’t necessary or event good; it’s that we shouldn’t rely on other people to be the sole educators of our young people. It’s why I think the open source community, Linux geeks in particular, are key adopters of Scratch.

Tell me what think.