What did older students see in ScratchJr that kept them experimenting, revising, and sharing?
Perhaps ScratchJr gets right its tools for personalizing characters. Its drawing tools are intuitive and fun. Only a few students drew characters completely from scratch (like an arrow that players could tap to control another character), but many students used the paint bucket to re-color stock characters or the free-draw tool to give characters extra features. On a tablet, Tynker’s tools for personalizing characters feel like an assembly line. ScratchJr might have helped students feel like the characters they were using were more like their own creations.
“Get to the space ship before it takes off!” says a speech bubble at the start of one girl’s ScratchJr game. An astronaut then races across the screen. I don’t hear many students her age talking about the recent box-office success of The Martian, so I’m inclined to think the student invented this nonviolent but conflict-rich story line more or less independently. Perhaps that’s another of ScratchJr’s strengths. Tynker’s lessons tell students what to do. Even in free-build mode, Tynker’s web app labels characters “heroes” and “villains.” With these type of roles pre-assigned in students’ imaginations, and with pre-made costumes like “Attack 1,” “Attack 2, "Attack 3,” and “Block,” Tynker is not exactly leaving to a student’s imagination the direction in which the story line could or should go. (To Tynker’s credit, at least the first page of heroes is all female. Students can click to see male heroes, too.) Perhaps ScratchJr provides students with more a blank canvas for expressing their creativity, and perhaps older students–even if they see stock characters like a cartoon cat and a baby, can find a way to make the game their own.
When a student yesterday asked me “How do you make things shoot,” I assumed he was making a traditional arcade-style game. When he shared at the end of the class, though, I was pleasantly surprised to see a much more original creation. His work had become a narrative of kindness and sacrifice in which a cat yells, “Watch out, baby!” before intercepting a magic bolt that a wizard shoots in the child’s direction.