Scratch

1. Title - Scratch

2. Description of technology. - Scratch is a multimedia tool that allows the user to create music and animation with a very high level of detail. Scratch uses a control panel or a scratch pad, where the user can drag a series of commands ranging from simple to very complex in order to program games, music or animation - or both.

3. Some issues. - This program is not what I would call 'first time' user friendly but that's not to say that with practice and experience it cannot be mastered. The ability to create some very complicated work should be incentive enough to allow appropriately itchy students to be set free on the scratch environment.

4. Educational applications - The time and patience required to figure out smooth operations would be enough to leave many teachers scratching their head, so I think it's fair to say that Scratch doesn't belong in every classroom. However I think to cater for certain individuals and many levels of intelligence's this kind of application is a great outlet for creativity. If it was attempted as a main stream lesson or activity, I think the key would be to give the students clear and firm instructions to assist in the initial learning of Scratch and once more simple tasks have been completed the difficulty level of the tasks can be adjusted according to the teachers interpretation.

5. Other thoughts. - This program seemed to cop a fair beating from the 'critics' in our class for being a bit too complicated for using, but if you used explicit teaching and focused just on one aspect of the program I think the students these days would have little trouble understanding what to do and even learn a lot about very complicated art of media production. Personally my interests lie in music education and I feel that scratch has done a good job of creating an asthetically pleasing application that can be utilized to achieve user controlled creations in music or combined with other visual media.