This past summer, I spent a lot of time on professional development. I was fortunate to attend three top notch conferences which amazingly enough, drove home the same message. What I heard loudly and clearly was that kids need to be responsible for their own learning. To quote Mitchel Resnick, Director of the MIT Lifelong Kindergarten Lab, 'Students need to imagine, create'…and that brings me to this amazing application that is available to every student anywhere in the world for free. It's called Scratch.

Scratch is a programming language that allows kids to create interactive games and stories that can be shared with others as well as studied and tinkered with by others. Students learn so much more than how to make pigs fly around the screen or how to make your mouse chase the picture of a cat. To see actual examples of what kids are doing with Scratch, check out the website at http://scratch.mit.edu.

According to the Scratch website, this program was developed for kids, ages 8 and up, to develop 21st century skills. As they work on projects, they learn mathematical and computational ideas while learning about the process of design. Is Scratch really all that? Yes, it is, but it is so much more!

The first day of the Scratch Conference, we listened to a keynote by Mitchel Resnick. He shared his creative learning spiral of Imagine, Create, Play, Share, Reflect, and Imagine with examples of how Scratch can help the kids do just that. After he shared how the program is reaching kids in after school programs and summer camps, and how it is making a huge difference in kids' interest, he introduced four students to continue the keynote.

Four students? We were all packed like sardines in this auditorium. The unfamiliar languages that were all around me hushed as these four Scratch users shared their experiences with the program. They were from Russia, Belgium, US, and England.

These kids had created their Scratch products and posted their work on the website specially created for this purpose. Others see their work, download it if they want to, and play around with the code. Or they post in the forums that they have another idea that might be considered. Before you know it, these kids are communicating across countries and continents. Scratch is being translated in many languages so there are no barriers for these kids. By bringing the four kids together to talk and share, we realize that something else is happening here…something so incredible and so wonderful. 

I remember when I was a child in the 1950s. The mere mention of Russia and Khrushchev was enough to stop us from eating the freshly fallen snow in case there was "fallout." I surely never thought of the kids in that country as anyone I would ever meet. There was never any concern for their well-being on my part.

But look what is happening. Our kids today log on and share their work, their creations, and their worlds with other kids everywhere. They do it with blogging, with Scratch, with epals (http://www.epals.com/). Surely this has to bode well for the future. If education and having like experiences is going to break down the walls that have separated so many countries from each other for so long, I can finally see the end of fighting and wars.

The next few days of the conference, I made good use of the incredible students who were there. They were very willing to help us old folks to program the pico boards (USB boards that can be programmed to react to light and sound) or to learn some fancy script. I met one 16 year old boy from Hawaii who taught himself trigonometry because he wanted to do some fancy script in his projects.

This is what we want from our kids today. They have the global arena to play in and work in. They can log on, use Scratch, imagine, create, play, share, and reflect. They don't want to stop. They don't seem to appreciate the lack of boundaries like I do.

I am thinking that learning these 21st century skills will keep the fallout out of my grandchildren's snow!

Note: To hear the keynote speakers and to view videos and pictures taken during the conference, log onto http://scratch.mit.edu/conference/.