My 2024 as a Learning Resource Designer • Codified Concepts

2024 was certainly a busy year for me as a Learning Resource Designer for the Scratch Foundation. As I look back on all I created and accomplished this year, I’m really proud of the work that I did and how I challenged myself this year. A few numbers:

85+ Scratch projects over various accounts
24+ written resources
15 original YouTube videos
1 live create-along
Scratch Conference co-emcee
12+ workshops facilitated (including at ISTE and in Vietnam!)

Read on for more details and links!

Resource and Scratch Project Creation

In 2024, I created over twenty-four written resources, which included lesson plans, coding cards, guides, posters, etc. I also wrote, filmed, edited, and produced fifteen original videos for the official Scratch YouTube channel. On my channel, I’ve created a YouTube playlist with links to all my Scratch videos as they are released, as well as publicly-available videos of me representing Scratch at workshops, conferences, and speaking engagements. While the resource hub of our new website is still under construction at the end of 2024, I did help upload and QA over seventy-five resources that will be shared out when it is ready. In the meantime, you can check the video descriptions for links to related written guides and coding cards that I’ve produced.

I continue to create projects in Scratch on my main algorithmar account and my alternate scratchlycaterton account, as well as engage with the community via profile and project comments and participation in online community events to demonstrate digital citizenship.

I’m providing on-going support and content creation for our Product Team projects such as Debugging Tips, Block Help (coming soon), and the redesigned Ideas and Starter Projects pages (coming soon). Click the bug icon on the project editor screen to see my debugging tips, also available in poster form here. Or get a preview of the 30+ new or remixed starter projects my colleague Eric Rosenbaum and I have been working on by visiting the scratchteam account.

And in addition to that, I’ve created assets such as graphics, social imagery, close caption files, etc., to support our resources, programs, and projects throughout the year.

Workshops and Speaking Engagements

Scratch in Practice (SiP), Scratch Education Collaborative (SEC), and Scratch Educator Meetup (SEM) Workshops

In 2024, I supported our new Scratch in Practice (SiP) virtual workshops, which invite educators in K-12 classrooms to learn about the Scratch platform, online community, and ways Scratch is used by young people and educators around the world. Our goal is to have participants deepen their creative confidence through playful exploration of Scratch programming, exploring learning resources, and engaging with the wider Scratch global community with interactive and hands-on opportunities to tinker and play! In addition to supporting all five SiP sessions in 2024 by creating learning resources as takeaways, I created and facilitated two of the sessions with my colleagues, Tracy and Prasanth, that focused on lesson plans I created: Bring Yourself Into Scratch and Experiencing Creative Learning: Paper Planes, Turtle Graphics, and Computational Concepts.

I also had the pleasure of producing and hosting two SEC workshops for the newest cohort (on Making Faces Stop Motion and Tinkercad with a Scratch connection focus), as well as being a guest speaker at ScratchEd Quebec’s virtual Meetup and Scratch Ed PDX’s in-person Meetup.

Vietnam Workshop

In October, I visited Vietnam for the first time and was honored to have the chance to co-facilitate a full-day series of teacher workshops on our work at the Scratch Foundation and lead educators through some engaging creative learning workshops at the “InnovateEd 2024: Pioneering the Future of Learning” conference held at Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST) and then attend their STEAMese Festival the following day. We guided them through three activities that explored our creative learning philosophy and put those principles into practice. I endeavored to re-imagine some of our past workshops in a more localized context and created a series of playful example Face Sensing projects using Vietnamese-inspired assets by the STEAM for Vietnam team. I challenged myself to provide multiple examples that met “low floor” and “high ceiling” needs, and I embraced wide-walls by ensuring my example projects covered a variety of entry points from games to informational projects to storytelling. The attendees were so engaged and shared many wonderful examples created during our time together!

Hour of Code with Gitanjali Rao

In December, I had the pleasure of hosting a live YouTube create-along for the Scratch Foundation to celebrate Hour of Code with inspiring young innovator Gitanjali Rao. In the months leading up to the create-along, I developed two projects around invention and kindness, as well as lesson plans, coding cards, posters, videos, and other promotional materials for Scratch’s Hour of Code 2024 submission. (You can find all the links in the “Inventing with Gitanjali Rao” or “Spreading Kindness with Gitanjali Rao” lesson plans.)

I also worked with our Scratch Youth Advisory Board members to curate a weeklong studio where users could showcase their projects. And I think our live create-along was goofy, fun, and a great conversation! You can catch the replay here:

Scratch + LEGO “Build the Change”

My Scratch Education Collaborative colleagues started work on our partnership with LEGO for “Build the Change,” and I had the pleasure of participating in one of their workshops while in Boston meeting with SEC groups and then taking what they started to build out a facilitator guide and coding cards, as well as provide some example projects (here, here, and here), so that we could help our SEC ecosystem partners lead their own workshops. The finalized workshop is made up of three activities that scaffold learners’ understanding of sustainability: (1) discussion to (2) building models with reusable materials to (3) creating a Scratch project that incorporates the model, bringing to life ideas on how to integrate sustainable elements. I love LEGO building, so no one needed to ask me twice to create my sustainable model with LEGOs.

Thanks for following along as I looked back on 2024!

You can find me on Scratch as codifiedconcepts, but I’m most active these days on my work account, algorithmar, as well as on my tutorial account, scratchlycaterton. I also post frequent updates about my work on my Instagram and LinkedIn (recent activity to see my posts).