Lifelong Kindergarten with Mitch Resnick
In this interview with Mitch Resnick, we discuss misconceptions people have around the four P’s (Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play) in Mitch’s book, encouraging depth of understanding while playing, what has surprised Mitch during his career, encouraging online communication and collaboration without creating artificial engagement, what Mitch wishes we’d see more of and discuss in CS education, our pet peeves with unplugged activities and computational thinking, accounting for survivorship bias with Scratch, expanding our focus on equity and inclusion to include both the “who” and the “how,” the importance of experimenting and learning through play, and much more.
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Welcome back to another episode of the CSK8 podcast.
My name is Jared O'Leary.
Each episode of this podcast
is either a solo episode where I unpack some scholarship in relation to computer
science education or an episode with a guest or multiple guests.
In this week's episode, I'm chatting with Mitch
Resnick, who might be most well-known for being a professor at MIT
and a lifelong kindergarten group which might be best known
for working on scratch.
But they also do a lot of other really cool products.
In our discussion,
we chat about the misconceptions people have around the four P's
of projects Passion, peers and play in Mitch's book Lifelong Kindergarten,
as well as how to encourage depth of understanding while playing.
What has surprised Mitch during his career?
How to encourage online communication and collaboration
without creating artificial engagement what Mitch wishes we'd
see more of and discuss more of in science education.
Our pet peeves with unplugged activities and computational thinking,
accounting for survivorship bias with scratch, expanding
our focus on equity and inclusion to include both the WHO and the how,
the importance of experimenting and learning through play and so much more.
As with each one of the episodes you show, notes includes links
to relevant resources that we mentioned in this particular podcast.
So make sure you click the link in the app listening to this on or visit
Jared O'Leary dot com and click on the podcast tab.
By the way, if you're interested in getting started with scratch
or are already using it,
I highly recommend checking out the resources
that I have created and shared on my website
and through boot up the org, which is the nonprofit that I work for.
All the resources are 100% free.
I'm not selling anything anyways.
We will now begin with an introduction by Mitch.
Hi, I'm Mitch Resnick.
I'm a professor at the MIT Media Lab, where I lead a group called
the Lifelong Kindergarten Group, and we call it lifelong Kindergarten,
because I have always been inspired by the way children learn in kindergarten,
where they're playfully creating things in collaboration with one another.
And in our group,
we try to take that type of learning and spread it to learners of all ages.
We think it shouldn't just be for five year olds.
We think especially to thrive in today's fast changing world,
everyone needs to have a more of a kindergarten approach to learning.
Can you tell me the story of how you got into computer science education?
I got started when I first met
someone who became my influential mentor, Seymour Papert,
and Seymour was one of the great pioneers of technology in education.
I met him in the early 1980s.
At the time, I'd been working as a science journalist
and I was writing about different technologies and sciences.
So I think I was always interested in communicating ideas,
and I was doing that as a journalist.
And then I went to an event was called the West Coast Computer Fair.
It was a little bit like an early version of a Maker Faire
before there were maker fairs, and it was many of the early computer hobbyists.
It was right after person computers had first come out and Seymour
was giving me a keynote talk at the West Coast Computer Fair.
And I was just really inspired.
But he talked about, I think I had seen computers, I knew I enjoyed programing,
computers, and I knew the productive ways they could be used in society.
But Seymour gave a different vision of computers.
It wasn't just about getting a task done,
enabling us to express ourselves new ways and see the world in new ways.
So it opened my mind to thinking about computers in a whole new way.
I also had always enjoyed working with kids.
I'd been a camp counselor, so a lot of things came together.
I had this thought of you, this inspirational,
you know, vision from what Seymour was doing.
It connected with a lot of my interests of enjoying working with kids,
enjoying communicating, helping people learn things.
Journalism was one way of helping people learn things,
but doing things in education was a way that really resonated with me.
So based on that, I ended up coming to MIT,
where Seymour was a professor, and I ended up
becoming a graduate student, work with Seymour and others.
And from there that was like in the mid 1980s
and I've been working on the similar types of things ever since.
Of course, there's always new projects and new technologies,
but I think that core idea was one that I became fascinated with and,
and I feel really fortunate.
It's been like a guiding set of values ever since then.
So one of the things that I'm really interested in is like
how people's philosophies of education have kind of changed over time.
I'm curious if you can think back like before you met Seymour,
like what was your philosophy of education and how did that change after the fact?
I don't think I'd explicitly thought about a philosophy of education
because I wasn't in the world of education before that.
I think there are some clues just to the way the things I've been engaged with.
Like when I was growing up, I did enjoy creating and making things.
I still like to tell the story about,
you know, digging up my backyard and making my own mini golf course.
So I wasn't just interested
in playing sports, but creating my own little golf course.
In middle school, when we had to do a science fair project
rather than doing some type of hypothesis
and test on the hypothesis, I made it to the museum exhibit.
I think I'd always enjoyed going to a science museum,
so I enjoyed like making these exhibits to people, understand things.
But by making it, I was also understanding things better.
So I think that approach of museums and doing things based on their interest
in creating things were always part of the way I learned things.
But I hadn't really thought about it as a philosophy of education.
But when I heard Seymour talk about it, it sort of resonated.
It sort of felt right to me
and it aligned with some of the ways I had been learning it.
Also, it felt like a humane approach to education.
It represented the type of world that I would like to live in.
So I hadn't really thought about it beforehand,
but it really represented not just computer science education,
but more an approach to learning that was really valuing and respecting children.
When I grew up in a family that valued education and valued know
supporting children in their learning activities,
so it was really respectful and valuing of children and their own
explorations and ideas in a way that really resonated with me.
Yeah, being totally on board with what you're saying, I often see that
the discourse around education is almost the opposite of that.
It's not valuing what somebody knows, especially kids and saying, Oh, well,
I as the educator or standards developer or curriculum developer, I'm
the one who's going to set the direction and you need to learn this.
And if you don't want to learn it, well, then you just fail the class
or need to retake a class, etc..
So it's like almost like it's flipped.
And I wish that that would change in the modern discourse around education.
Yeah, I totally agree.
And I do think it's a central thing that I learn from Seymour
and have been supporting over the last 30 or 40 years.
Is that too much of education is based on a model
that might be called a transmission model or delivery model where you're delivering
instruction or delivering information.
And as you said, trying to flip that.
So it's less about delivering instruction, but more creating an environment
where people can investigate, explore, experiment
and learn through those investigations and experiments and design experiences
that is really supporting the learner in their, you know, creative explorations
as opposed to delivering instruction and information.
But you're right that it goes against that.
I think that other is a dominant paradigm
and it can be seen as and is very efficient inside that is easier
to put together and to be honest with every new generation of technology.
It feels that we face the same battle with every new technology.
First gets used as a way to deliver information, deliver instruction,
and we always have to sort of push to get people to think about it
otherwise of just creating environments.
It can support people in there exploring, experimenting and learning.
Yeah, I just had flashbacks when like 1 to 1 devices,
like when iPads were being implemented in schools,
it's just basically a digital whiteboard and whatnot.
So that definitely resonates.
I was fortunate that I had some administrators in the last school
that I was in who are very supportive of the classes that I was doing.
They would frequently walk into the room
and be like, How did you get those kids engaged?
I was like, Well, not forcing them to do something they don't want to do.
I'm asking, What are you interested in?
How can you explore that through code?
I have seen pushback from other like colleagues
or administrators in other schools, in other contexts and whatnot.
And so in a previous podcast that I did, it was talking about the four PS,
like the projects, peers, passion and play.
I posed the question at the end
was like, What principles are missing from the four piece of creative learning?
So I'm curious, like when you've heard criticism
or skepticism, when you discuss the four PS,
what do they feel is missing, or why did they think that
that would not apply in their particular context?
I think sometimes the pushback comes from a misinterpretation
is that most people hear more about the type of approaches
it seemed were proper talked about and that I have been trying to support.
And they don't as well call it an unstructured approach to education
as if there's a they make it into this dichotomy.
Either we're providing some structure about what children should learn
or when they say unstructured, I mean, let them do anything right.
And our approach should not be seen as to let them do anything.
And when you use words like play as we do in one of the four PS,
sometimes people interpret that way, let them do whatever.
And that's really not a word I'm encouraging.
I do want to provide a lot of agency for the learner
and let allow them opportunities to follow their interests.
But there's a lot of structured support to enable them to succeed.
So we want to allow people to follow their interests.
Then we need to provide them support.
Though I still like to say that we want to provide enough freedom
for them to follow their fantasies, but enough structure and support
so they can turn their fantasies into realities.
Because without that structure and support, you know,
they could just go off in all different ways
and they won't necessarily be able to succeed at following their fantasies.
But I do think it's so important to allow people to work on things
that are meaningful to them.
And one reason maybe it hasn't become more widespread
is that it's not always easy to support that,
because if you have a classroom of 30 kids and they're of their own interest,
there's some challenges in supporting that.
Whereas if you have everybody doing the exact same exercise,
following the same step by step instructions is then easier to evaluate.
How well are they making progress towards the same goal that they're all aiming
for, the exact same goal?
It's easier to evaluate and measure their progress, but it's also
kids end up not being engaged and they don't get as much from it.
I think one thing we've seen over and over
is that when young people are working on things that they really care about,
not only will they work longer and harder, but to make deeper connections
to the ideas that are part of the activity.
But it does require a different approach on the role of the teacher or the mentor
or the facilitator, nor to support young people as they're doing it.
I have to quote a line from John Dewey, the great educator and philosopher.
Like probably 100 years ago, Dewey was talking about some of these same things.
These are not all new ideas.
And when Dewey described his approach to education,
at one point he wrote, he said, it's simple, but not easy.
And what I think he meant by that is you can describe it simply.
I describe it in four piece.
He described it other ways.
You can describe it simply, But it's not easy to put it into practice.
To know how to support it
requires a different approach to teaching and facilitating.
Yeah, that really resonates.
I'll include some links in the show notes to some of the presentations I've done
and even prior podcasts that talks
about like Rising Matic learning and how you can have it.
If there's 30 kids in the class
going through 30 different projects at the same time.
And then like
Affinity Spaces by James Poggi, I did an episode that talked about that.
So like there's a lot of things that you can put in to support and it
like what Mitch was just saying, it sounds really easy, like, Oh,
all you're doing is facilitating working with kids one on one,
but there's so many resources and like things community wise culturally
that you have to set up in advance and on the fly to really support this.
Well, I want to highlight one of the things that you mentioned.
So like a lot of people,
when they maybe think of kindergarten, they think of playful and fun and whatnot.
So if we have a lifelong kindergarten group, awesome.
It's playful, it's fun, but how do you get that depth? And so
having a background in music education and like the skill development
related to learning how to play an instrument and having done this,
I know that like the same things that you can do in a very structured
sequential learning
environment can be done through play, learning a skill and whatnot.
But I'm curious, how do you respond to people who are like, okay, but
how do you encourage them to not just skim on the surface of CSS or coding?
Well, I do think by having them have a meaningful experience
with people who work inside, they care about,
they're going to dive into it and go deeply with it.
They don't want to skip the surface because they care about it.
Mm hmm.
Know, and as part of that diving into it, they might need to do some things
that are very structured and even sort of repetitive, live
in ways that might not seem part of a playful process.
But they're willing to do it because they care about it.
Now there's research about in order to become to get expertise,
you have to do things in a repetitive way over a long period of time.
My first reaction was, well, that feels that
it's going in a different direction than what I believe.
But then I realized that sometimes it's important
to be able to sort of repetitively practice.
Something in practice can be very important, but
it still really wants to get expertise.
They're only going to be motivated for that practice
if they really care about what they're doing.
So this idea of doing things you care about
is not at odds with practice, it's aligned with practice.
Once you really care about something, you're willing to put in the hard work,
maybe that gets to another.
You not have to misinterpretation.
People think if you talk about play that we want to make things easy
and we're not looking to make things easy.
And I don't think kids want things to be easy.
They want things to be meaningful and they're willing to work hard
if they're doing something that's meaningful, connected to their interests.
So the goal should not be to make things easy.
And of course, we don't want things difficult for reasons that don't matter.
You should try to make things easy to use.
But it's not that you want to make things easy for kids to make progress.
That's something you do have to work hard,
but people are willing to work hard if you know they really care about it.
Yeah, at least in the competitive performance world for music education,
they would often have rating systems where it's like this is a level one piece,
a level five piece, Level five is very advanced, difficult.
Level one is more like, this is your first year playing through that instrument.
I would frequently have kids that I would work with and even with myself
where their average performance level might be at like a two.
But they really want to learn this piece.
That's a level four and they're so committed to it.
Like, yes, it's way
above like their current ability level, but because they're so interested in it,
they're willing to put in that grind and really sit there and work through it
that they might not be if they were handed a level two piece and even like when
before I was saying that generally we try to avoid the delivery model
of delivering instruction.
Yeah, well, the other hand, when kids are ready to learn something
and they seek out delivery of instruction, it can be very useful, Right?
I thought about that in connection with sites like Khan Academy.
You know, I would not think it's a good idea just to turn over
the whole third grade curriculum to just kids sitting in front of one video
after another of you getting instruction from a Khan Academy video.
On the other hand, we've had some kids who are learning to program it
in our scratch programing language, and they're working on a game
and they want to learn something and they get stuck.
And then they'll look at Khan Academy and find a video that teaches them
how to do the things that were keeping them stuck.
And that's really useful where they can turn
and get that instruction when they need it.
It's a wonderful thing.
Yeah, that just in time learning is key.
Some of our most popular videos on boot up YouTube channel are those like scratch
tips that we do where it's like,
Here's how to use variables to keep a timer or to keep score.
Or there is one way that you can use your backpack to make your life easier
when working in scratch, etc.
And like,
those are very popular and the most comments
that we get are usually like,
you just say me now I know how to create a start button
for my game or like things like that.
So having that just in time,
like, Oh, I have this question, let me find an answer to that.
It works great as how I tried to approach the classroom as well, where it was like,
okay, I'm not going to come up and lecture.
I'll be walking around the entire time helping you out, encouraging peers
to kind of collaborate with each other and whatnot.
And it worked great and I happened to have administrators who supported it.
But like I said, not everybody has that.
You've already mentioned some misconceptions about some of your work.
I'm curious, are there any more that haven't
been discussed or the ones we talked about?
I do think finding the right balance between structure and freedom
is the key dimension that people don't need to get a better understanding of.
And it shouldn't be seen as a dichotomy, but finding the right way
to have the right mix between them to me is the most important thing.
Yeah, having taught some undergrad and graduate courses,
typically undergrads will learn about constructionism or constructivism
and they'll be like, Oh, this is great.
But then they'll take it to an extreme of like,
okay, I need to avoid any form
of direct instruction, and if somebody has a question,
I can never answer it, I can only respond and questions, etc., etc..
It's like, No, no, no.
There's moments for that that reminds me of a story.
I had helped start this network of afterschool learning centers called
Computer Clubhouses, which started by my close colleague Natalie Rusk.
And I was I worked with Natalie on this and we started with one clubhouse
in Boston.
Now there's a whole network of 100 clubhouses around the world,
and the clubhouses are based on this approach to,
you know, learning creative approach with projects, passion, peers and play.
I remember one time visiting a clubhouse
where there was a new mentor that was coming,
and they rely on volunteer mentors to come in and support the young people
coming in to the clubhouse to work on creative projects.
And the mentor came in and I think they were suggesting something
like they enjoyed making different types of animated comic books
and they said, I'd be interested in running a workshop for kids.
I could come in on Tuesdays and run workshops on animated comic books,
and the coordinator of the clubhouse said, No.
Here at the clubhouse, we don't run workshops.
We let kids do things that they want to work on.
I said, No, that's exactly the wrong thing,
because I think would be a problem if you said everyone
at the clubhouse must make an animated comic book would not be good.
But if this mentor was to come in and do a workshop
about and a comic books for kids who were interested in learning it, that's great.
So just as you said, it's not a matter of just standing back
and let the young people do whatever they want or only coming in
when they have a question for you.
It's fine to interject things.
The point is
it should be up to the young people to decide
whether they're interested in doing that or not.
Yeah, I'm curious,
what is something that has surprised you over the course of your career?
I think the place where I've sort of learned the most and been
the most surprised is on the social side of learning.
I, I start by focusing a lot on
developing tools to let kids express themselves creatively.
Again, as I mentioned, I was inspired not just by the ideas of Seymour Papert,
which is logo programing language.
It was a programing language for kids that
came out with their early first computers,
and it was a way for kids to be able to create things on the computer.
And I started working on projects that gave kids new abilities
to design and create and experiment and explore.
And although I understood the importance of learning with and from others,
I hadn't focused on it as much as we started working on our scratch software,
which was very much inspired by Logo with Scratch,
we made a graphical programing language which made it, you know,
removed a lot of the syntax challenges and you didn't have to learn the complex
punctuation and grammar that you did with a text based language.
We also added control over media so kids can more easily
do things with animations and sound and music.
But another element we added was a social dimension.
So I sort of knew that it was important that a social dimension
and we started work on scratch in the early 2000s,
right as the internet was becoming more popular.
I must admit I didn't recognize how profound a difference
the Internet was going to make
and the learning opportunities and the way that we would develop Scratch.
We had the idea that we would want kids to be able to share their projects.
We didn't quite know what that meant.
I was very fortunate being at a university.
We had graduates, students who had grown up on the Internet.
It was a generation younger than I was and they had so much better intuitions
about the way that this could be used to support collaboration and sharing.
And then once we launched Scratch in 2007,
the thing that surprised me the most were all of the creative ways
that young people used the community and the collaboration possibilities.
Of course, they're also doing just great,
you know, stories and games and animations with scratch.
But the way they interact with each other is what really surprised me.
It blew me away.
Everything from, you know, kids would start work on a project
and then if they would put out a call for help
and say, Here's my project, I want to add another character.
I'm not quite sure about it.
You know, if you create a character or add it to my project.
So people were, you know, calling out for other people.
They were crowdsourcing for their project.
Other people would offer their consulting services.
You would say, I really enjoy making background music for projects.
If you need background music, I'll add it to your project.
And then of course, we made Scratch so you could easily remix each
other's projects.
We were amazed that about a third of the projects
that came on Scratch were remixes.
People saw other projects, made changes to other people's projects
and then added it to the community I never expected again.
I think my next generation graduate students did expect this,
but I was really surprised at the wide range of ways that kids were collaborating
and how the creativity and collaboration were so linked together.
It because the collaboration, they were able to do more creative things
and because their creativity, they were more interested in collaborating.
Yeah, so people like James Paul Jr have talked about how
you can't really force that kind of collaboration
on these kind of informal spaces and whatnot.
I've seen a lot of teachers in particular over the last year and a half
because of COVID and remote learning.
They have tried to create like post one discussion board
question and respond to other people's questions, like they've tried to force
this kind of community engagement to try and simulate conversations and whatnot.
I'm curious, from what you've learned, how do you encourage
that kind of engagement without forcing or making artificial?
It's always trying to keep things authentic.
So when kids are working on things that they really care about,
then it comes more natural.
Like, first of all, there be more responsive to suggestions.
If they're working on a project that they really care about,
they're making a game that they want other people to use.
When they get suggestions, they'll be responsive to those suggestions
because it's not just to complete an assignment.
If you're completing an assignment for school,
you want to be finished with it and someone gives you a suggestion.
You don't want to hear it. You already finish the assignment.
But if you're creating something
you want others to use, you want to have the suggestion
because it's going to make something that's more appealing to others.
And also, once you feel that you're a member of the community,
you feel invested in helping out others.
That's one of the things that I think has been one of the greatest satisfactions
with Scratch
is the degree to which young people have cared about helping one another
and the type of kindness they have in supporting one another.
And I do think it's because they feel that they're part of a shared community.
But it has to have an authentic feel.
It's an authentic community.
They weren't just thrown together.
They chose to be there.
They want other people to be looking at their projects,
using their projects, giving feedback and suggestions
so they're more willing to do the same for others.
And we did see a lot of this during the pandemic.
So as you mentioned, there was a lot more focus on online
learning during the pandemic and some pushing towards collaboration,
but sometimes pushing rather than just opening up the possibilities.
And we did see that also.
It really was satisfied to us to see the growth
of the types of collaboration in the scratch community.
Like one thing we saw in the last year, the number of projects
shared in this community roughly doubled over the year before.
There was a lot more activity, partly because kids at home secluded, isolated
during the pandemic want a place to come, to share ideas, to do creative work.
But interestingly, the number of projects doubled,
the number of come and went up five fold
wasn't
just the kids were being participating more and making more projects.
They were engaging more with one another.
So I see that and it feels to me you can feel this yearning for connection.
And for me, that's one of the lessons of the pandemic.
You see the importance of connection and kids isolated.
They're hubs where yearning for connection.
So they were doing even more commenting and suggesting in other people's projects.
And I hope that's a lesson that we learn
as we hopefully over time move beyond that.
The importance of connection and community in learning.
I think the pandemic highlighted it.
Schools that were just trying to deliver instruction oftentimes
had a hard time engaging young people online with those that paid
more attention to the human needs of kids were the most successful.
So I hope that we can take that as a lesson.
It shouldn't be just when you're isolated at home, but at all times
we need to do a better job of supporting connection and community
and hopefully that will be an important things that comes out of the pandemic.
Are there any differences in how teachers have been engaging in the community?
We have seen some teachers, a teacher that we interviewed
in the Chicago Public Schools, a wonderful principal who,
because of the pandemic, made lots of changes in the school.
So they were doing due to scratch, but also in other ways as well.
But she turned her school to be much more project oriented
because she realized that in order to keep kids engaged and motivated,
let them follow their interests, work on projects,
and then they would make presentations about their projects to the school
became much more project oriented during the pandemic.
And she said that in some ways that although
all the terrible tragedy from the pandemic,
it was something that opened up new opportunity to trying out things.
I do think she was partly freed up to try things out
because there weren't as many constraints on her.
There were fewer standardized end of the year test.
The kids had to be prepared for it.
She was able to make different types of changes.
It opened up new learning experiences and that really enriched
the learning experience.
Yeah, I'm glad they're able to frame that in a positive light.
I'm wondering, what do you wish you would see more of either in scratch
or in CSS education?
I do think I think it's CSS education, but also it leaks over into scratch
more focus on kids creating things.
Now in some ways that seems natural to me.
You know, when you're coding, you can create things, but
that's often not at the core of CSS education.
Oftentimes the real focus is on concer ops of learning, particular concepts.
And again, learning concepts is important, but I do think we can best
learn concepts through creating things.
Too often schools think you have to learn the concepts first,
and then you can create things where this with coding
or any other activity, getting learn the basics first.
Then you can work on projects.
And I think our view is you should get to learn the concepts
through projects, not before projects.
And it's why we made the whole structure of Scratch is so project based.
It's not just about learning.
Solving a puzzle to learn a certain concept is about work on a project
you care about and learning the concepts through doing that.
And in a lot of places that's not what see US education is about.
And unfortunately, even though we tried to design Scratch
to highlight the importance of working on projects and creating things
and iteratively refining your creations, it's not always used that way.
So too often we do see scratch used in a way.
We're just learning the core concepts and the technical skills of coding,
and it misses what we think is most important.
And we've seen this at times.
There's one story that sticks in my head at one of our scratch conferences
that we had with educators all coming together here
at the MIT Media Lab for several days of sharing experiences and learning
new ways of using scratch in the classroom and at a reflection session.
At the end of the conference, there was an educator from Hong Kong
that stood up and said he was like embarrassed to admit
that until now he'd been realized
that he was using scratch the wrong way, and he said his kids had not enjoyed it
and the teachers in that school had not enjoyed it because it was
just being used to teach them particular set of skills.
And he now saw the opportunity of using it
for kids to work on meaningful projects and learn through that.
And so it just opened his mind to new ways.
So of course I was very happy that the conference had led him
to understand new ways of thinking about scratch and computer science education.
But of course I was sad that the teachers and children in his school
had been using in a different way until then and in many other places.
I'm sure a similar thing happens.
But I do think we need to make that transition
of not just thinking about learning concepts and technical skills,
not saying those are bad things, those are good things,
but need to do it in the context of creating.
Yeah, we've had some districts that we've worked with who will ask, Hey,
do you have like a one pager that shows like all of the standards,
alignments and concepts, alignments, etc.
with the curriculum that a great like no, we don't.
But what we encourage you to do is focus on
just going through projects that kids are interested in.
You can go in any order you want
and they'll happy to learn concepts and practices standards along the way.
And if you happen to notice some gaps later on than cool,
here are like five projects that kind of address those.
Pick one that looks interesting to you.
Well, people don't understand
is like when I created this curriculum, I didn't look at the standards,
I didn't look at the concepts, the practices.
I just went with what our kids are interested in
and how can we go through those interests in a way that's meaningful to them.
And then let's find some standards that happen to align with it after the fact.
People often start with the opposite of that.
So I'm wondering, what do you wish you would see less of?
So if we were to flip that question from more of an education,
what do you wish you'd see less of in scratch or see?
I said, Well, following up, I mean less focus on just learning the concepts.
Also, sometimes around in our research group here
we have a pet peeve around the way some people use unplugged activities.
Now, it's not that there's a problem with all unplugged activities.
It's great to do some physical world activities and there can be value in it
and we do some of them, but too often unplugged activities are used
in a way to focus only on the concept and not on the making of things.
Now, of course, in some places they're,
you know, argued you don't have access to technology.
There can be good reasons for doing it.
And also there can be unplugged activities which do evolve, creating and making.
So I can imagine some things
without the technology we are creating and making and learning some things.
But I think the reason some people find it appealing
because it can focus in on just learning the concepts
without all that clutter of dealing with the problems of making things.
But in my mind, the clutter is what's important
and that the activity of creating and reflecting on your creation,
modifying your creation is where you make a deeper connection to the concepts.
Yeah, I feel the same way, honestly, about how a lot of people described
computational thinking.
It's without application of that understanding.
Okay, you learned in composition, but why?
Okay, you learn pattern recognition, but what are you going to use it for?
How are you going to create?
How are you going to model?
Yeah, and even the phrase computational thinking, again, it's hard to argue it.
There's clearly important ideas and we highlight some of those ideas
of computational thinking.
But the problem is if it's focused only on the thinking part
without the creating, part two will often focus that we're
engine computational thinking in the context of computational fluency.
When we say fluency, it means being able to create things
and express yourself with the technology, and we are able to express yourself.
You do learn those important computational thinking concepts and computational
thinking skills, but in the context of learning
to express yourself, we often make the analogy
with learning to write, and we've been inspired
by some of the approaches of educators to come up with ways
of supporting young people, learning to by expressing themselves
and try to have an alternative to the way that in too many places
kids learn to write by focusing on spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Yeah, it's not.
It's like punctuation and grammar are bad.
It's good things to learn.
But if you only focus on spelling, punctuation
and grammar, you're not going to fall in love with writing. Yep.
So we're inspired by places that have focused on learning
to write by telling stories and once you tell stories,
you want to learn spelling so that people understand your stories that you write.
But the focus should be on telling the stories
and learning how to share your ideas.
And we think the same with coding is sometimes a lot of approaches to coding.
Focus too much on the grammar, punctuation and spelling side of coding.
You'll learn some things there and you might learn some concepts there
and you might learn some of those computational thinking concepts.
But for us it's both can be more successful and most meaningful For kids.
It was done in the context of the equivalent of telling stories
is creating your own, you know, interactive stories, games, animations
on computer.
Yeah, that parallel with writing definitely resonates with me.
Having like all my degrees in music education,
I've gone through eight semesters of music theory classes and it's
spending eight semesters of analyzing music and basically
looking at the grammar and punctuation but never creating your own music.
And it's so decontextualized that I ended up
hating it like I had no joy in taking those classes.
But if you were to ask me to write music on my own, yeah, I'd love to do that.
I wish I had actual composition classes and whatnot.
And so afraid that like Katy and even CSS might head in that direction
where it's like we're learning these concepts
without applying it in some kind of creative or expressive way.
Totally agree.
And it's important to emphasize to people
just by focusing on the joy and the expression doesn't mean learning.
The technique is unimportant because in order to really be able
to express yourself, you will need to learn that technique.
But you should do it in the context of expressing.
I'm wondering,
how do you account for the survivorship bias that happened with Scratch?
So you have millions of kids who are creating these awesome projects in there
and it works really well for them. They absolutely love it.
But then you have some kids who might not engage with it
and they end up leaving the platform.
So how do you account for that and like learn from, Oh, what is it about it
scratch that was not appealing to a small subset of students.
Well, it is challenging.
If you only look at the projects on the online community, you will see
the projects of kids who succeeded in sharing something in the online community.
And you don't see what happened to the kids
who lost interest before they shared.
Obviously, you can learn a lot by looking at the projects
in the online community, but as you said, you might miss some things.
So I think it's also important
continue to work with kids in person, know to see what they're doing
and to see where they lose interest and where they run into challenges.
Do we continue to, in our research group, go out and do workshops with both young
people and educators locally to introduce new features
and to see, you know, how engage with them, what they find
challenging, what they find interesting or not interesting.
So I think continuing to engage with people
individually is really important to get a sense of what's
going to be working, what's not working individually, but also then
relying on networks of people you trust who are doing that.
So we learn a lot just from other people tell us and you know, other educators
we worked with for years
who will then talk with us about what's working, what's not working.
So relying on a network
of trusted colleagues who can report about what's working, what's not.
Yeah.
And you're fortunate that you have such a huge reach.
I mean, scratch is used around the world, so you can get many
different perspectives.
Yeah. And we always learn so much,
you know, when we have, like, this scratch conference.
Some of it, of course,
is a way for us to share our new ideas with educators who come.
But just as important, we learn so much from the educators.
So the educators come and they're often surprised because they feel that they're
just an educator working in a fifth grade classroom in some small town somewhere.
And what do they have to offer?
But we they tell their stories.
We learn so much from that.
So actually, the last in-person scratch conference, we set up a booth
called Scratch Stories, and we just recorded educators
telling their scratch story about something where they were
proud of the happen, their classroom, or a challenge in their classroom.
To just us.
Hearing those scratch stories is so important.
I don't think I actually saw that booth
when I was there, but it was a wonderful conference.
So whether it's virtual again
next time or eventually in person, I highly recommend people attend it.
If I like, just give you a magic wand
and you could change something about the discourse in education
or like the purpose around this, what would you change and why?
Well, there are probably a few things.
There's both sort of the goals and the methods.
Well, let me start with the methods.
We've already been talking some about changing the methods.
The methods shouldn't just be you teaching to learn concepts
or giving a prompt to learn a concept, but methods should be more
allowing people to express themselves and learn through the project they create.
I think the goals also need to be rethought that oftentimes
it gets introduced purely on the grounds of trajectory
towards becoming a professional programmer or computer scientist.
So the job opportunities
and it's important to emphasize there are great job opportunities.
So it's not that that's a false narrative, it's a true narrative.
If you get engaged with this and become excited about it and invest yourself
in learning more about programing and computer science, there are great job
opportunities, but that should not be the only reason for doing it.
The same reason you shouldn't learn to write
because you want to become a journalist or a novelist.
There are great opportunities that journalists are a novelist, but
there are other reasons to learn to write specifically with computer science.
Getting a job as a programmer, computer scientist,
it might be one reason, but we shouldn't focus so much on that.
And a lot of it is if we introduce coding and computer science,
you know that the right way to help kids learn
some sort of skills that will be important to them no matter what they do.
So we often say our main goal is to help young people learn to think creatively,
reason systematically and work collaboratively.
And I think those are skills to be important to everybody
in tomorrow's society, in a society that continues to change very rapidly.
And there's a lot of unpredictability.
Thinking creatively is important to be able to come up with new ideas
in an ever changing world to creative thinking, supported
systematic reasoning, which certainly comes from programing,
even if you're not actually programing in the future.
The type of systematic reasoning that comes from it is useful
in all types of problem solving and then working collaboratively,
you know, in order to
tackle the types of problems and projects that are needed in the future.
You need to be able to work with other people.
So I get most excited when computer science education embraces
that as a goal of thinking creatively, reasoning systematically,
and working collaboratively as a main goal rather than just
the job opportunities from developing programing technical skills.
Yeah, one of the examples that I frequently have given,
like when working with kids and whatnot, and they'd be like,
Why do I need to know this?
And it's like, well, I've created some games for myself and for my friends.
I proposed to my wife by modding a video game, so like I changed
the code in Minecraft, put our dogs in and all sorts of fun stuff.
I didn't have to learn Java, I wanted to get married.
I thought it'd be a fun way to do that.
So there's a lot of ways that you can express yourself.
But like September when we're recording This is National Suicide Prevention Month.
And so like, it's on my mind that mental health is this thing
that we need to address more and talk about more, especially in K-12 contexts.
And like thinking of programing as and
CSS as a way of a creative expression and being able to like explore
your own thoughts and your own interests
and whatnot, like it's so beneficial from a therapeutic standpoint.
My wife, by the way, is a therapist.
So like we talk about it frequently, but it's one of those things
where it's just like it's not discussed enough.
We focus so much on the jobs we don't talk about,
like all the health benefits you can get from just expressing yourself
through code.
Yeah, and of course, I don't want to underplay
the economic opportunities and it not just as jobs as a programmer,
but by learning these skills that will help you in all types of work.
But we're not. Let's focus on the workplace.
If done well, it's going to be supporting you in your work
life, but also in your personal life and in your community.
Life, as you were saying, just enable to, you know,
lead a satisfying of a feeling, personal life.
You've been active contributor to your local community.
You know, these types of skills.
It's important that we have all of those in our goals, not just your work life,
which is important, but your personal life and your community life,
your civic life are very, very important.
I'm wondering, like building off of that, how do you work through
the pressures that can come with like working in the field of education?
As a scholar, working at MIT like you, I imagine, are a very busy individual.
How do you prevent
that burnout that can come with having so many pressures and whatnot?
When I do it, I invest a lot of my life in my work,
so I could be someone who people would see could get burned out.
I think there are few ways of trying to avoid it.
I do have some other activities I enjoy running in the morning.
I run most mornings.
I play tennis with a good friend once a week.
So there are other outlets that maybe even more important.
There are a lot of satisfaction I get from when I see
the impact that the work is having with young people around the world.
Like just yesterday, a close colleague sent me an email that they received from
someone who was talking about that they visited their brother,
they spent time with their nephew, and then an 11 year old nephew
who had learned scratch.
This was a nephew that had lots of challenges, wasn't always successful.
And, you know, sort of the traditional academic channels.
But if they become excited about scratch and start to see themselves in a new way,
and it opened up them seeing themselves and the world in a different way.
So when I hear stories like that that helped prevent the burnout
that I just see the reading that it has in young people's lives,
how do you practice or iterate on your own abilities, either
as an educator or as a researcher or even in computer science?
Well, I do still make scratch projects and they'll sometimes be comments
from young people in the community where they'll see the type of project
they say, you know, didn't develop scratch.
He's still making scratch projects
or they might be sad about my birthday and they know my dad.
I mean, I'm a lot older than they are.
They say he's still making projects,
but I still learn and enjoy
and get joy from creating, you know, scratch projects,
even just to make an interactive birthday card for a friend.
Or I mention I play tennis, I did a little tennis simulation. When
you try to understand why our competition was working out the way that it did.
So I'll use scratch just in my own personal expression as well,
and then try to have different learning experiences.
Actually, I'd like to do that even more.
Like during the pandemic, we all got ukuleles and tried to start learning
to play the ukulele with one another and talk about the learning experience.
I also started doing
a lot more cooking than I ever did before, since I was at home.
That was a new learning
experience, different ways I could express myself through cooking.
So I always tried to learn new things.
I think I could do an even better job of that.
I think I could invest even more on that.
I do think that time that's so important for all of us to continue
to see ourselves as learners. Yeah, I like that.
It's also like helpful, especially from an educator standpoint,
to remind yourself what it's like to be at the beginning stage of something.
So I'm very slowly learning Japanese and it's a constant like daily reminder
of how much more I have to learn and how difficult sometimes it is
to learn something new.
Historically, when you want to learn something new, you become an apprentice
like a silversmith or, you know, other experts.
If we think about what is it, we hope our elementary school kids will be learning.
Learning how to become good learners is probably the most important thing
they can learn.
More important than anything about multiplying fractions.
Yeah, but if we want to become good learners,
they should be apprenticing to good learners.
So it's important for teachers to be good learners and for students
to see teachers as learners.
That's one thing in our afterschool learning centers, these clubhouses
we always emphasize to the mentors we talked before about how they shouldn't
just sort of stand back, but they should engage with young people.
It's great for young people to see these adult mentors learning
new things and to be open about when things don't work.
A lot of times the youth in the clubhouse will be surprised when an adult mentor
does something.
It says, I don't understand what's going on, and they'll be surprised.
You know,
this person who seems like a real expert, they don't understand what's going on.
It's great for young people to see that
their mentors, their teachers don't understand everything
that's going on and then to see how did they work through that?
Yeah, every Thursday I would share at the start of class,
here's a bug that I was working through or I'm still working on
from the previous week, so that way kids could be like, Oh,
it is also experiencing bugs just like I am on a daily basis.
What about equity and inclusion?
Do you have any recommendations for the field of education,
how we might improve that?
Because maybe one thing I'd emphasize there is there's both the who and the how.
Sometimes understandably, efforts in equity inclusion focus just the who.
How can we get more of people in this category involved?
And that's clearly a very good goal.
But I think to really be successful, we have to focus on the how
what are the types of ways of engaging which will make people from those groups
feel welcome, feel engaged,
feel that they can be a contributor, feel that they are a member of the community.
So I think we try to focus a lot on the approach
and the spirit of the community to make sure it's welcoming
the people of all different backgrounds and all different learning styles.
And we've often focused to make sure that like in our work with Scratch,
it is about developing your voice, because I think if you want people
to feel included, they have to feel that they're having a voice.
So with Scratch, it's not just learning about the technical skills,
but learning how to express yourself
and then becoming
a member of the community where you have a voice in that community.
So I think if we really want to support equity and inclusion,
then it's not just a matter of identifying groups,
but making sure that we create an environment that's both welcoming
and supportive of people, developing a voice as full and active contributors.
Yeah, at the time of this recording, there's a recent podcast episode
that I did where I unpack some scholarship talking about Bourdieu
and looking at CSA implementations and interventions from a Rhodesian perspective
and say they're talking about how like there's all these like studies
that are looking at who, but they're not necessarily talking
about the structures of the structures and how that impacts things.
And if we want to really have systemic change,
especially around equity and inclusion, then we have to focus on that.
So that definitely resonates
with that particular episode and what they recommended.
But I'm curious, so like you run your own research,
you work with many people who also run excellent research in your lab,
but I know that you can't do everything that you want to do.
And I'm wondering
what do you wish there's more research on that could inform your own practices.
I'll start by saying there are different categories of research.
I first heard this phrase from my colleague Natalie Rusk.
I think she might have heard it from someone else, but she said,
we want to focus more on improving, not proving.
A lot of research is focused on proving something.
Does this work?
Does this not work?
Rather, I wish there were more research on improving
about how to take something and put it into practice
in a way that's going to work better.
So it's not that's a matter of proving the value of play in the learning process.
I think I know the value of playing the learning process, but improving
the ways that we can facilitate a playful learning experience is so much more.
We can be learning a lot of this fall.
The category facilitation, how we put these core ideas into practice.
Because I feel there's a lot of research over the years
and a lot of evidence over the years that these approaches
we talk about projects, passion, peer is in play.
I'm not looking for evidence to show that these work.
I believe they work, but it's hard to put them into practice.
How do you facilitate an environment to make sure that these
are put into practice in a way that really is going to work in different contexts?
And we know that is not recipe.
So there's so much to learn about
how to put these ideas into practice in different contexts.
So I would like to see more research about to put these ideas
that we really believe in, how to put them into practice
in different contexts to make sure that they really take hold.
Yeah, I really like that framing.
So whether it is Natalie
or somebody else, whoever came up with that, it's wonderful.
What's something that you're working on
right now that you could use some help with?
Let me mention like one project to again start on.
I'm not sure there's a way to help right now, but there will be in the future.
We are certainly I think our biggest core commitment
is supporting creative learning for young people around the world.
And scratch is one platform to help support
creative learning experiences and has been incredibly successful,
I think, on this bigger issue of just how can we support creative learning
itself and efforts we have underway.
First, I'll mention one
that has been way up for a number of years and people can participate in
IS started as a class called Learning Creative Learning.
It was an online class, also a class we teach here at M.I.T.
and it evolved from not just being a class but a community.
And several of the people in our research group, including Carmela
Persichilli and Lily Cabaret,
have taken the lead in recent years of leading this online
class in community, where educators from all over the world come together
to learn about creative learning and share their ideas about creative learning.
So that's one way that we support creative learning around the world,
and we want to do even more of that.
We're getting started on a new initiative that we're calling Creative
Learning for All, and it's our effort to build a network, a global network
of playful learning communities that support creative learning.
And we're doing this.
Our research group is doing this in collaboration with the Tinkering Studio
at the Exploratorium in San Francisco,
which is a group that I think has done incredibly creative work
also in supporting creative learning experiences.
So we're working together of building
this network of educational organizations that are supporting
creative learning experiences so we can all learn from one another.
So our hope is to be able to amplify and elevate
some great examples that we see around the world,
because there are great examples already,
but a lot of times they're not known about.
So this creative learning around the world effort,
we want to elevate and amplify some of those examples.
We want to have, you know, workshops and conferences
where people can come together and share ideas with one another.
We want to be able to advocate this approach to learning
so that policymakers and educational administrators
get a better understanding
of why this is so important and how it can be put into effect.
And we'll also be creating some new tools and resources and materials
to help support educators putting, you know, creative learning into practice.
We're just at the early stages, so people should keep an eye out for that.
You know, over time will have more of a presence online
where people can find out more about creative learning for all
and can both learn from what others are doing and participate
in some of those activities, I imagine there's going to be a wide
range of people who would be interested in that,
not just in like education, because like I think the late Sir Ken
Robbins TED Talk is still the most popular one that they have on their channel.
And it's all about how the schools tend to kill creativity.
So, yeah, that'd be awesome.
Are you intending it for it to be used broadly or are you thinking
within the scope of education creatively or beyond that?
Our focus is more on
your reaching educators and the education world, but also parents.
I with you that I think it has implications than applications
throughout all of society.
But I think in trying to, you know, need some types of focus,
I think we would have reached both formal education like schools,
but also informal settings museums, libraries and parents
and also policymakers who support you know, different education initiatives.
I think that the core audience will be looking at,
yeah, I look forward to learning more about that.
What question have you not been asked that you wish
people would want to discuss more?
A question that's so important is stepping back and asking the why question.
So it's not just about what it is that we're going to teach kids
and how we're going to teach them.
But why do we make these decisions about, you know, what's
important in education and even take a step further back?
What's important in education is what type of society do we want to live in?
So as we were discussing earlier,
I want to live in a society where it's not just valuing
what you can do to be successful in the workplace,
but also how to bring joy and purpose and meaning into people's lives.
So one reason that I think creative learning is so important is I do think
it's the best way to secure success in the workplace in the future.
You know, things are changing so quickly.
Creative learning and creative thinking will become more important
in the workplace than ever before.
But it's not just for the workplace.
It's also the creative learning
also brings joy, purpose and meaning into your life.
And that also is important.
We should value that and it should be one of the purposes.
What motivates how we set up our education systems.
So I wish people would spend more time talking about the why questions.
Why are we doing all of this?
Because if you love the right,
why the how and the what might be headed in the wrong direction?
Yeah, that definitely resonates with me.
I really appreciate that response.
It's hard though, because there's a lot of people
especially outside of education, who look at it from a neoliberal lens
and assume, Oh well, the purpose of schooling
should just be about career readiness and whatnot.
And so they don't think about anything else outside of that.
No one thing that's somewhat I think is fortunate
in our current moment in history is that I do think
is pretty well aligned, that helping kids develop as creative thinkers.
I hope that I would have been arguing for that 100 years ago, 200 years
ago, 300 years ago.
I think the need for creative
thinking in the workplace is much greater now than ever before.
So I do think the needs of the workplace for creative thinking and collaboration
aligns with the type of education that I would have wanted to provide in any event.
So I feel very fortunate that there is more of an alignment.
Now, it is true that, you know, you're 150 years ago at the beginning
of the industrial age, a lot of jobs were just about doing a repetitive thing
on a conveyor belt, and creative thinking was not necessarily valued.
So in the education system that taught you to be disciplined
and do things in an accurate, repetitive way was valued
in the workplace that's less valued in the workplace now.
So again, 150 years ago, I still think we've been good to creative thinking
in that in schools because I think that's so important in our society overall.
Now there's a stronger alignment that we can you know, it's still arguable
what I think is best for economic success also happen to be
what's best for the full human experience as well.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Do you have any questions for myself or for the field?
Well, encourage people to be willing to try
new things and experiment the same way that we want young people
to be constantly experimenting, trying to take risks, to experiment.
That's part of what we mean by play.
A playful approach.
It's not just about the activity of playing a game, it's about an attitude.
We are willing to experiment and try new things.
I think educators and policymakers do the same thing
that we're going to need to continue to experiment and iterate
and try new things if we're going to be successful at this
and then look to find ways to connect
with others who have this sort of shared goals
because we are going to be able to make this change on our own,
We need over time to be able connect together and work together
to meaningful change to learning in education.
How do you try and connect with others?
So like, do you use specific platforms or specific groups you go to?
I do some things through my writing, so I will take
this as an opportunity to plug my book Lifelong Kindergarten.
It came out a few years ago
but captures the core ideas that we've been talking about today.
You know, the subtitle is Cultivating Creativity Through Projects.
Passion appears in play, but talks about these ideas,
both the why and how of creative learning, and then continue to try to share
those ideas through various posts and other ways of communicating
through this online course and community
that we have called learning creative learning.
So there we have videos and resources and I think we want to continue as we look
ahead, have more ways of communicating these ideas
and more resources to help support people using it.
And then I do think the best way for people
to really understand these things is through experience.
So we'll never stop trying to create tools that enable people
to have creative experiences and running workshops and events
that engage people in creative experiences I think are so important
to where my people go to connect with you and the organizations that you work with.
Well, obviously, to check out an example of the tools
and environments we've created, go to the scratch website.
It scratch MIT edu on the about page.
You can find some resources, but also you don't have to be a kid to
try out scratch.
So there's online video tutorials.
Try it out.
Let the kid inside of you come alive.
Go to the Learning Creative Learning website.
If you just Google learning creative learning, you'll find the website.
We're learning creative learning.
And on there there's lots of videos and resources.
There's actual courses run from time to time,
but the resources are always there.
And you can see some of the previous forums,
but also the resources and the videos that are there.
So I think those are really
some of the ways that you can find out some of the things that we're working on
and thinking about and what that that this week's episode of the CSK podcast.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode.
I hope you enjoyed it and consider sharing it with a fellow colleague
or posting review on whatever after you're listening to this on
just a friendly reminder that there were many different resources
that we mentioned
throughout this episode, and you can check those out
in the show notes at Jared Lee or Ecom.
And if you're interested in a scratch
and scratching your curriculum, make sure you check out Buddha PD dot org,
which is the free curriculum that I create that has just under 100 projects
at the time of this recording and more on the way.
Stay tuned next week for another episode and until then,
I hope you're all staying safe and are having a wonderful week.
Guest Bio
Mitchel Resnick (@mres), Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab, develops new technologies and activities to engage young people in creative learning experiences. His Lifelong Kindergarten research group developed the Scratch programming software and online community, the world’s largest coding platform for kids. He co-founded the Computer Clubhouse project, an international network of 100 after-school learning centers, where youth from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. Resnick was awarded the McGraw Prize in Education in 2011 and the LEGO Prize in 2021. He is author of the book Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play. For more information about his research and publications, see http://www.media.mit.edu/~mres
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More podcast episodes that discuss creative computing/coding
Watch the video of how I proposed to my wife by modding Minecraft
Watch Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk I mentioned on creativity and schools
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Find other CS educators and resources by using the #CSK8 hashtag on Twitter
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