SCRATCH DAY: FRIENDSHIP AS A MOTIVATION TO PLAY AND CREATE WITH SCRATCH PROGRAMMING

The “Scratch’ando com o sapo na infância” (“Childhood with Scratch in motion”) project promotes the use of Scratch programming by children from 4 to 6 years old. On 24th May 2011 was organized the Scratch Day event at “Colégio da Torre” in Lisbon (http://day.scratch.mit.edu/event/436), where children could play alone with other children as a result of the knowledge acquired between February and May at the Scratch experiencing and training sessions tutored by the researchers of the project team and the kindergarten teacher. Scratch Day is an international day sponsored by the MIT Media Lab that intends to gather Scratchers (people who program in Scratch) and other people, in order to learn how to program, share projects and experiences.
The theme of the Scratch Day at “Colégio da Torre” was the friendship, which was discussed through a philosophy for children (PFC) session with four groups of children. This session was followed by the ludic social interaction and the creation of stories in Scratch. The discussion about the bonds of friendship was related to the tutorials’ characters of the "Childhood in motion with Scratch" project: Pópio, Pópia, Sylla, Argus, Bilóca, Bicuda and Friends who came from afar, available at http://kids.sapo.pt/scratch/formacao. At the end of the session, children were challenged to use these characters to create narratives in Scratch.
The Scratch Day event was a fundamental strategy in the project development, since it was the culmination of the intervention-training-experiencing sessions undertaken. In the event session, different strategies was used, in order to engage children with Scratch, namely the conversational one (giving meaning to the technological mediation), face-to-face interaction (helping children by explaining, guiding and co-participating whilst answering their questions), and finally the mediated technology interaction (using the Scratch programming).