Mitch Resnick’s TED Talk relates to the themes of our course in terms of Choice Based and Student Centered Learning, Discovery and Learning, and Design Thinking.

In discussing children’s interactions with code and Scratch through the MIT website he helped to create, Resnick describes their choice based and student-centered learning. He first begins with sharing how kids used Scratch to make Mother’s Day cards. This kids demonstrate their fluency in using Scratch by creating something meaningful, expressing themselves in doing so. This is student centered learning because of its personal relevance to the student (their desire to make something for their mother), which makes learning to use this platform and code intrinsically motivated. The creations are also choice based, such as how one child programmed the option for the mother to replay the birthday card. This connects to our class in that our projects tend to be student centered and choice based as well. With our Tribute Cards we had an intrinsic desire to put effort into our work for someone we cared about, exactly like these kids did with their Mother’s Day cards. And our current project we are working on, the Partner Scratch Game, similarly involves choice for the viewer.

Resnick also discusses students discovery and learning, specifically their ability to learn through exploration. This is achieved in the Mother’s Day cards as well, but also in the example he gives of kids in Hong Kong using code to interact with the physical world around them, through building their  physical interface device using a light sensor which would detect the hole in the board when moving the physical saw, allowing them to move the virtual saw simultaneously. This exploration of what code can achieve leads to advanced learning. This theme of discovery and learning is also strongly impacted by student centered learning; as Resnick puts it, “They’re coding to learn” which opens up new opportunities (as it did for those kids in Hong Kong), and they’re also “learning in a meaningful context”. This personal relevance and discovery created by student centered learning excites and motivates students, and as Resnick gives as an example, learning stuff like variables suddenly becomes meaningful because they can use it to accomplish their goals. This also leads to a deeper understanding and connection to what they are learning. In our class we develop this deeper understanding through the work being meaningful, but we also learn through discovery similar to the kids Resnick discusses. We are presented with materials and platforms to explore, we are provided the resources and we learn what we can do with them by simply playing around. Our projects all begin with the same information but develop very differently based on what we do with it and where we take it.

Resnick also describes how Design Thinking comes into play with Scratch. Children experiment with new ideas, break complex ideas down into simpler parts, and troubleshoot when there’s a problem. Along the way, they learn skills in persistence and preservation, creative thinking, systematic reasoning, collaboration, and new forms of self expression. Resnick makes a point to emphasize that these skills learned in code and Scratch are transferable to any situation/ career, and are life-long. This is directly connected to our class, in that we use design thinking every time we work on something and that these skills are transferable to other courses as well. We work together tor share ideas and problem solve as well, like the collaboration Scratch utilizes that Resnick discusses. And in accordance with the design thinking process Scratch embodies, in our course we always start with a vision for a project, and as we progress and prototype and problem solve that vision is developed or even recreated.