Wow, the turnout for today’s Scratch class was incredible! I didn’t even have time to count heads, but there were at least 20 kids, each with one or in some cases both parents. Not bad considering event promotion consisted entirely of this page on Upcoming:

Learn to use Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/), a visual programming language targeted at kids. Parent involvement encouraged for children under 8. (Ages 5 - 12)

The few terminals we’d set up would have been overwhelmed, but thankfully almost everyone brought laptops with Scratch already installed. (A less-technical audience probably wouldn’t have done that.) Most kids were in the suggested age range, and a few had used the program before.

We gave a brief tutorial with the default project, which simply showed movement, turning, and looping on a single sprite. And that was it - we just turned them loose and told them to flag us down if they had questions. By the end we were seeing rotation, costume changes, sound effects, sprites following the arrow keys, drawing with pens, kids remixing each others’ projects… It was spectacular!

So I’ll echo the advice I’ve heard before if you want to do one of these events yourself:

• Provide machines with Scratch preinstalled and running. (Older hardware is fine.)
• Give a brief introduction (less than 5 minutes).
• Say you're available to answer questions.
• Get out of the way.

I originally scheduled a break after half an hour and asked everyone to come up with a question to ask in front of the group - I regretted adding even that much structure. When time was up, it became clear I was interrupting 20 kids’ concentrated work, so I left off. My only remaining interruption was to encourage the kids to share their work on the MIT Scratch site, and to ask us if they needed help. Derek suggested adding a “gangplank” tag to posted projects.

You can view the resulting gallery here: http://scratch.mit.edu/tags/view/gangplank

There were a couple teachers in attendance, and I gave them my contact info and offered help with setup and/or teaching. Hopefully there will be events at a couple schools as a result. If you’re involved with an Arizona school or club and want to host a class, please post in the comments.

Many thanks to GangPlank for hosting the event, and to Derek Neighbors, Mike Bennett, and Jade Meskill for helping field questions!