Scratch is another programming/new media tool geared for children. Here’s the description from their site:

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

The existing course description of the New Media Writing and Online Design course I’ve inherited this fall reads, in part,

This course will focus on the design/development/creation of texts from crayons to webtexts. The course will focus on the materialities of writing and composing.

While I’ve been told that I can do what I want, I do think important to keep the course within the spirit of the course description these students read when they signed up for the course. Not that I’ve got a problem with an emphasis on the materialities of writing and composing or that I’ve got a problem with having students work with crayons as well as bits. (I’ve always been fascinated with Rich Rice’s course in which students work with clay to create cuneiform business cards and rabbit skins to create illuminated manuscripts.) We’ll be doing some things like this as well.

I’m also interested in exploring some new media composition tools like Scratch or Story Creator 2, which presumably have much smaller learning curves than Flash or Director, to think about the affordances and constraints of such tools in comparison to others such as paper and crayons, PowerPoint, or Move Maker and iMovie. In other words, I’m not looking to teach the software these students may eventually use but find some tools that will let us jump inform our theoretical readings and discussions with some praxis. The second half of the course will then focus on poiesis, on having students make. In other words, your run of the mill digital composition course more or less into which I’ll likely be throwing in some Ulmer, some Rice (both Rich and Jeff), some Wysocki, some McLuhan, and some Ong.