"ScratchKids" was a SCRATCH workshop at the Surrey Children's Festival lead by graduate students from the School of Interactive Arts + Technology at Simon Fraser University. The workshop's goals were to introduce children to new media tools for story creation, and to collect children's self-reflective accounts of creativity in a sprite-based digital narrative-building workshop.

The research and related workshop were lead by Allen Bevans, Wendy Foster, Andrew Hawryshkewich, and Katie Seaborn, who are all current master's students at SIAT. The workshop was held in collaboration with the Surrey Art Gallery and the Surrey Children's Festival.

Children between the ages of 8 to 13 took part in our half-hour digital media workshop. In pairs, they created an interactive mediated story using SCRATCH, a simple programming language for children. Some even uploaded their creation to this website, and are able to download it later to continue working on it.

Scratch is a visual programming environment, developed by the M.I.T. Lifelong Kindergarten Group, that facilitates the creation of interactive stories, games, music, and digital art. Scratch lowers the barriers for novice programmers in the creation of digital media, and promotes learning and reflection on mathematical and computational ideas, creative and critical thinking, logic, and collaboration.

How do I get SCRATCH on my computer?

Visit the SCRATCH 1.4 Download page to install SCRATCH on your home computer.

At the end of the workshop, everyone was given a short survey that assessed self reports of creativity. The questions were modifications derived from the Creativity Factor Evaluation toolkit, and the scale was adapted from research done on use of the Smiley-o-Meter. There were five questions addressing five factors (exploration, collaboration, engagement, effort/reward tradeoff, and expressiveness).