Game Pad
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Scratch breaks down into three domains: on the desktop, on the Scratch website, and through the Scratch Sensor (PICO) Board.
GamePad is a class that the Learning Technologies Center has been running for youth since the Sensor Board became available. In GamePad, the participants develop an interactive game in Scratch—an introduction to computer science—and then explore electrical engineering through construction of circuits and sensors. I’ll talk about our experiences connecting Scratch to the real world through the Sensor Board, and how using the Sensor Board has helped us develop new program approaches to connecting the screen world with the physical world and provided new ways to explore personal narrative and basic circuits and sensors. A little history
MIT Crickets and "Programmable Bricks" MIT shared their work with the crickets with a number of educators in the community. These earlier versions were programmed with Microworlds - a multi-media version of Logo. One of the very interesting things about this combination was that you could have the Crickets send sensor ( light, heat - all sorts of types of resistance-based sensors) data back to the programming environment and use Microworlds to mediate that data - one of my favorite projects tracked the motion of hissing cockroaches around their container home.
This was an early Life Long Kindergarten Project created to encourage and support the use of the MIT crickets
This is the current commercial version of the MIT cricket.
We had begun looking at other programming enviroments that could be connected to the real world via some sort of sensor board or microcontroller.Netlogo was extended to connect to the GoGo board.You could build simulations that connected to data being collected live by the board.
www.gogoboard.org/cocoon/gogosite/home.xsp?lang=en
www.gogoboard.org/cocoon/gogosite/home.xsp?lang=en This is an opensource microcontroller platform - it could be used with Microworlds, Netlogo and a number of other programming environments.
Scratch
Around 2005(?) during a visit to the Media lab we met John Maloney who was beginning to work on Scratch and he showed us a demo of I believe a gogo board connected to scratch where he was using sensor data to move a car(?) around the screen - This might have been eToys but I know that I was struck by the idea of the simple board - versus a cricket or microcontroller that could do everything this seemed to focus only on input. ( corrections are welcome)
After that visit we started talking with John Maloney and Amon Milner about the ideas they had and the work they were doing developing a sensor board built specifically for Scratch. We were sent a couple boards to start with and got very very excited about the possibilities. So we asked if we could get enough boards to try some workshops and perhaps a class. We were sent a number of finished boards and shared these with some k-12 teachers we were working with and started trying them out in our own classes. Robbie Berg was working with the team on a version of the Sensor board that would feature built-in sensors - this would become the Scratch/PICO sensor board.
Amon was working with the board when we were as a developer/programmer/educator. Here are great examples of the amazingly creative interfaces he was getting working with the boards and thinking about new ways to interact with Scratch projects
Workshops and Classes
This was one of our first workshops that explored the idea of kids creating new ways to play a game that those kids created.In this first workshop we focused on looking at pretty complex ideas ( from Dance Dance Revolution to the Eye Toy to RFID tags)
We looked at switches and sensors. What we found was that a lot of the games that were being designed were designed to use switches - on and off or true or false inputs for game programs that were focused on quick or agile movement of sprites - rather than sensor measurements. A variation of the game Pad class was Virtual Genie. In this case we emphasized sensors rather than switches. We wanted to take avantage of the range of feedback and use that to give the interactive projects a rich array of responses although we started with true and false ( flipping a coin for your fate)
These are images from our latest Game Pad class - Summer 2008
These are projects from our most recent Game Pad class ( summer 2008)
This is the project that's being played in the video of the class where the student is standing and stepping on the clover-leaf shaped game pads on the floor.
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