This talk describes how educators who are neither programmers nor gamers successfully learn to create games with Scratch in an online course.
Art Techne is a unique graduate level technology integration course designed by artists, Carmin Karasic and Sam Smiley. Artists are good at seeing the relationship between disparate things. Sam and Carmin saw many interesting possibilities for pedagogy links between art, game design, and interdisciplinary topics. In this course, students discover and exploit such links, to build projects that demonstrate their viability in learning environments.
The underlying concepts and technologies learned from the course readings, discussions and projects are synthesized to create a simple educational game in Scratch. From the first class, each weekly experience further prepares the student to think logically about project development, while keeping in mind the importance of visual impact and simple interactivity. Each student ultimately becomes a Scratch game developer.
The first European conference on Scratch will be held July 25-27 in Barcelona. Educators, researchers, developers and other members of the worldwide Scratch community are gathering to celebrate and share the creative possibilities of Scratch. If you're interested in learning to program and programming to learn, join us!