The Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab has released Scratch, a new graphical programming environment designed to teach fundamental aspects of computer programming in a fun and easy-to-understand way. Kids can create games or stories while learning basic concepts of logic and programming.

The community aspect of Scratch is cool as well – because the environment is java-based, kids can upload their creations to the scratch website and comment on each other’s creations. I’m interested in seeing if the sharing aspect of scratch can elevate to the next level, where kids can complete a series of tutorials in order to learn more advanced capabilities of the system. If the satisfaction of completing a programming challenge was as satisfying as completing a level in a video game, kids’ investment in Scratch might continue beyond the academic user-testing-group and community-outreach testing environment that it no doubt was born in.

Scratch can also be controlled by a custom hardware controller, allowing kids to create projects that are controlled by a slider, button, light sensor or microphone.

Scratch Website
SEE ALSO : Lego Mindstorms NXT

An excellent article appears today on Boxes and Arrows. It gives an overview of the benefits of using a narrative technique to communicate complex interactions. In this case study, User Experience Designers developed comic strips to communicate broad goals to a larger and diverse audience.

Comics are effective not only because they are essentially narrative, but also because they are unpretentious, easy to follow, and accessible. Whereas a functional specification document uses words and often “tech speak” to communicate functionality, comics use pictures and interactions to get ideas across.

Can’t draw? Don’t have time to draw? Check out the comments at the bottom of the article for a link to designcomics.org, where the folks at Sun Microsystems’ web team have built a repository of free stock scenes and characters that you can use to build storyboards with little effort. The ‘examples’ section, which has tips for how to use narrative techniques to describe design choices, reads like an introduction to Aristotle’s Poetics:

Another common format is a three-act play: (1) A hero… (2) has a problem… (3) and solves it (or not)

The act of designing a user experience can be compared to developing choreography for a user to enact. Writing like this in sometimes-dry forums like Boxes and Arrows validates my belief that telling a story is a valuable way to describe interaction to a broad audience.

SEE ALSO – ComicLife : A Story Machine