I’m excited to be participating in a panel discussion at the Digital Media and Learning conference in March to talk about Studio Sketchpad and to publicly compare notes with three very talented people who have been instrumental in creating other web-based communities for learning, tinkering, and remixing with code. Andrés Monroy-Hernández (now of Microsoft Research) will be talking about Scratch Online and Kodu Game Lab, J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira (Learning Unlimited & What Will You Learn?) will be talking about the origin of AppJet, and Shelly Farnham (Microsoft Research) will be talking about peer learning projects at Microsoft Research FUSE Labs. Here’s the gist:

In this panel, we bring together four people who have actively engaged in making, tinkering, and remixing the designs of learning communities in which young people make, tinker, and remix with code. Drawing on experiences creating and experimenting with Scratch Online, Studio Sketchpad, Kodu, and AppJet, we seek to identify the socio-technical factors that impact peer learning with social media. We will talk about lessons learned and have a discussion about questions such as how to support young people’s development of a maker mindset.

We will introduce each of the four systems, drawing particular attention to the various mechanisms built-in for remixing, iteratively refining, collaborating, and sharing with others. We then use this as a starting point for identifying commonalities and differences to discuss in more detail. What do we agree are valuable components in creating a remix culture? What have we discovered to be promising, but ultimately unsuccessful? What styles of remixing have emerged and what seems to be their purpose? How generalizable are our observations?

This panel aims at providing insights for meta-designers, practitioners and educators interested in learning how to support and inspire young people to learn to create computational artifacts within a community of peers.

I’m looking forward to this conference, and am particularly looking forward to having this panel discussion. We’ll certainly post more about it as it approaches (and afterwards), but if you’re planning to attend, definitely drop me a note. You can find more info online about the 2012 Digital Media and Learning conference. It looks fantastic.

Viewing sketches created by people in the Studio was always possible, but wasn’t pretty or easy. Here’s what you had to work with:

In stark contrast to this, I have a beautiful little deck of cards sitting on my desk at home, with each card featuring a colorful snippet of a canvas created in the sketchpad studios. When the deck first arrived, I spread the cards out on a table to get the full effect:

Looking at the table that afternoon, it was pretty clear that these cards offered a glimpse into the studio that was much better than what I was currently displaying online. So when I finally started to redesign the studio, I used these cards as inspiration. Like any renovation, everything started smoothly but then began to drag. Fast forward a few months, and today I find myself with a free afternoon and an itch to ship. The result? Here’s what you’ll see when you log in to the new studios:

This layout works particularly well from displaying the set of all sketches cloned-and-modified from some template sketch:

I’m excited about the new look, and I hope you like it, too. I’m going to order a new box of mini-cards to celebrate!

In an attempt to have something tangible to show for my time spent on Sketchpad, I picked a few of my favorite canvases from the Studio Gallery to print on a deck of MiniCards. A small box of sketch snapshots arrived in the mail today, and I’m liking these a lot. Nice work, sketchers!

On the last blackboards of Richard Feynman:

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Consider, for a moment, the core verbs of participation on the web today. I’m not talking about GET or POST. I’m talking about CREATE, REMIX, SHARE, and DISCUSS. Am I forgetting any? Each of these represents a form of engagement that is meaningful — and near-ubiquitous — for most any website built around “user-generated content” (I triple-shudder on that phrase.) While Sketchpad is still embarrassingly-deficient on letting people DISCUSS (stay tuned…), I’ve taken a slight detour to test out a new verb: RECREATE. This is not a general-purpose verb, but I think it’s worth trying out on Sketchpad and sites like it, where there’s interest in supporting learning and teaching.

In basketball, you’ve got games like H-O-R-S-E. In art studios, you’ve got people attempting to replicate a masterpiece or copy a style. In music lessons, you’ve got students trying to repeat back what they hear their teachers play. I’m wondering if these types of learning exercises might make sense for creating things on the web. I can’t think of any examples of sites that support RECREATE as a top-level verb, so I thought I’d try it out right here on Sketchpad.

As of earlier today, every sketch has a little “recreate” link in the footer, giving you an entry-point to do just that. Click on it, and you’ll be given a blank canvas, the sketch editor, and the masterpiece of your choosing (drawn from any revision of any sketch found on the site). You can take a totally different path than the creator did, but the idea is to arrive at a finished version as close to the original as possible. Try your hand at making this tic-tac-toe game:

Or replicating this bit of recursion:

This is a brand-new experiment. I’m not sure if anyone will use it, so I’ll wait a bit to see. I the meantime, I’m adding it to the list of useful techniques for teaching with Sketchpad. If you’re an educator interested in testing this out, please let me know!

I just added a new sketch by Ari Prasetyo to the Studio’s gallery. If you look at the source code of this sketch, you’ll see that all of the comments and variable names are written in Indonesian. A few months ago, humphd mentioned that he was relying on Google Translate to understand what people were saying about the Processing.js project. I’m starting to have a similar experience with Sketchpad (my little corner of the ecosystem), and I have to say, it’s a lot of fun!

In the past week, I translated a Korean tweet, a French blog post, these Indonesian explanations, and many of the Spanish sketches in one of the new private studios. My favorite part of Google’s tool is that it automatically detects the source language. It deciphers compliments in languages that I can’t even recognize. I find it both gratifying and embarrassing that I actually need this magical feature.

One of the great features of Etherpad is that you could create a new document with one click on the homepage, and share it with others by mailing them a URL. No signup hassle, no up-sell, just click and go. I left this in, of course, when I built Sketchpad, but the real action now happens inside the Studio, which requires account sign-up/sign-in. I added some windows to the studio so outsiders can peer in, but there is still a real wall between the sketches created within the Studio and those created from the big button on the homepage. People do some great work outside of the studio, only to realize afterward that no one will see their creation. So I added a new feature that I think is a pretty nice solution: The ability to throw a sketch over the wall into the studio. To avoid metaphors and keep things clear, I just call this “save for later.”

When you click the link, you create an account, and a copy of your sketch (with a pointer back to the original) is added to your new sketchbook in the studio. Now others can see the sketch, they can see who created it, you can give it a name, and make it a part of the studio. I think this is a subtle but effective way to move from the great one-click-to-start sketch to the real action inside of the studio. If you try it out, please let me know what you think.

Dennis Daniels is more effective than you are at getting his feature requests heard. Why? Because every one of his requests comes in the form of a screencast video uploaded to YouTube. He has, literally, thousands of them online already, and he added seven to the count this week while looking at Sketchpad this week. I have to say, I have not seen a more effective way of requesting a new feature, suggesting a change, or demonstrating a bug. Each one the screencasts that Dennis recorded about Sketchpad has been both fun for me to watch — he appreciates many of the my favorite Sketchpad features — and difficult as well, as he struggles to find things that I built but didn’t make easy to discover. His screencasts are one part feature request and one part user testing session. For me, the guy who’s building the application, it’s a fascinating mix. Here are links to a few of them:

sketchpad studio UI force save revisions for rollback sketchpad UI request and plea for help create javascript exercises for Kahn Academy with processing Processing javascript open source and Kahn Academy Processing for Education and Kahn Academy Thanks to Marco Torchiano and his work! openprocessing and sketchpad: good ideas in both

I continue to receive great suggestions and feedback from people using Sketchpad through the UserVoice page that I set up (which is a very useful service!) I always respond to these as they come in, many have already turned into new features, and many more are on near-term to-do list. But Dennis’s videos are different. I can’t seem to put off these fixes and requests. It’s difficult to watch someone flail when trying to use something that you built. Test this out: record a screencast in which you struggle to accomplish something reasonable and useful in a web application, upload the screencast to YouTube, and email the video link to the application’s developer. Then start your watch. Count the hours before the problem is fixed, the existing feature is made more discoverable, or your must-have feature appears on their production boxes. If you send your email to the right person, I think that this will happen pretty quickly. I, for one, felt compelled to act after watching the videos. Wouldn’t you?

Next time I find myself wanting to request a feature on someone else’s web application, I’ll test this out. Perhaps I’ll do a video request for video requests on UserVoice. Or maybe I should record a feature request for recording feature requests on UserTesting.

Feeling inspired by the medium, I recorded a video response to one of Dennis’s feature requests. His request is the first video, and my response is the second. Enjoy!

The sketch that I’m playing with in the video is
Modified clone of “Spinner”

Part of what I love about Studio Sketchpad is that it’s an environment for creating digital animation that is focused primarily on process, and only secondarily on the product. When you find yourself impressed by the final version of something that someone built on sketchpad, you’ve only really scratched the surface. Don’t believe me?

I fired up ScreenFlow, turned on the closest thing to disco-themed music in my iTunes library (Super Disco Breakin’, by the Beastie Boys), and started stepping through the history of a sketch recently created by a few talented people working together. Check out the resulting video clip:

Here’s the final sketch. Click through to view source code history of this sketch.

If you send me a link to some of your complex and interesting sketches, I may have to make another video. Looking for a place to begin? Take a look through the sketches featured in the Gallery. Feel free to clone-and-remix anything that catches your interest, and take it from there.

Dan Ha recently uploaded a fantastic game called Swim, that he built with Nicole Roach and Cameron Teitelman. Complete with nicely-illustrated instructions! When I asked him about it, Dan said:

The sketch was designed for our CS147 class at Stanford University: Human-Computer Interaction. We designed it the sketch with the goal of creating a simple, fun game that would give kids an intuitive sense of physics. The fish and turtle serve as a metaphor for vectors – the size and orientation of the fish projectiles represent the magnitude and direction of a vector. When they collide with the turtle, the resulting direction and distance that it moves is the combined vector of all the fish projectiles.

Check out this full-screen version of Swim. Below the canvas, you’ll see the latest revision of their source code, complete with Processing syntax highlighting.

Great work, team!

I spotted a series of interesting sketches by an unnamed author Visa-Valtteri “visy” Pimiä this morning that I wanted to point out. I thought it was interesting to see each sketch build on the previous one. As always, you can do the same, by cloning and modifying any version of any of these sketches. The “clone” link is in the footer of each canvas.

was cloned and modified into:

and

was cloned and modified to sidescroll:

and again cloned for a whirling variation: