This is Part 2 of a series of blog posts. If you haven’t already, read Part 1 here and Part 2 here!
In February our group facilitated a series of remote workshops in collaboration with the ideaLab team at the Denver Public Library. To read more the design considerations of our first attempt at bringing the spirit of a Family Creative Learning workshops experience onto Zoom click here. These workshops were inspired by work of the Tinkering Studio team at the Exploratorium and the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT, who we were both collaborating with on a new “Facilitating Computational Tinkering” project. Within this theme we explored making two frame stop motion animations that showed everyday objects coming to life as well as importing pictures of an object to Scratch to begin to build a story. This blog post details our Scratch Workshop design.
SCRATCH WORKSHOP
Getting Started
For the Scratch workshop we wanted to continue the theme of “Make it Move” by showing participants how to bring an object of their choice into Scratch and animate it. Not all participants were repeated from our first workshop so aimed for a balance of building off of stop-motion animation using the IMGPlay app, while making space for those who were new to the virtual workshops.
Similarly to the stop-motion workshop, we asked participants to go on a scavenger hunt for a few minutes to find an object they wanted to bring into Scratch. Each family member introduced themselves as well as the object they would be working with.
Showing Scratch Basics+ Fearless Exploration Time
After introductions a facilitator shared their screen to walk through the basics of Scratch for a few minutes. We then gave participants 5 minutes of “fearless exploration,” encouraging them to click on buttons we hadn’t shown and to ask questions if they were stuck. After fearlessly exploring we asked a few participants to share what they had found to continue to bring participant voice into the workshop.
Using Remove.BG
Using remove.bg website to erase the background from a picture.
Next we introduced the website remove.bg via screen share to show how participants could remove the background from their images before bringing them into Scratch. The facilitator then showed a few more Scratch features before we encouraged open making time for around 20 minutes. We made sure to emphasize that adding a picture to their Scratch projects was optional, and participants could simply continue whatever they were working on during free exploration. We also wanted to make sure that participants knew that this workshop’s goal was just to get started and they weren’t expected to have a finished project by the end of the making time.
At the end of the workshop participants shared their Scratch project links in the Zoom chat and a facilitator shared the projects on their screen, again asking participants to talk about their experience making the project.
FUTURE GOALS
We hope that future workshops will continue to explore activities that allow families to use familiar objects in new ways in combination with technology. We are exploring the potential of creating kits that families can pick up at Denver Public Library branch locations before the workshops. We are also thinking through ways that we can better facilitate families getting to know each other during workshops through collaborative projects or by better utilizing the break out room feature. We are excited to see how we can continue to reach families with programming that is exciting and relevant to them in the future and can transition into in person workshop settings as DPL IdeaLAB’s spaces hopefully open up in the fall.
To read about or design considerations for our stop-motion workshop click here!
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2005764 and 190835.