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Please read and rate our proposal to the Knight News Challenge

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With my collaborators on the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers I am applying for a grant from the Knight News Challenge to scale up our demonstration program to additional school and community settings throughout Mercer County New Jersey.  The demonstration project, which has been supported by the National Science Foundation’s Broadening Participation in Computing program, (grant #0739173) has yielded evidence that middle school students can become turned on to computer science by learning to do computational journalism in their own communities.  Further, we’ve established that properly trained and empowered, middle school teachers can become catalysts for change and innovation.  We’ve been fortunate to work with some exceptional teachers at Fisher Middle School in Ewing, New Jersey who will form the core of a network of teacher-mentors that we hope to build across the region.

Although the deadline for submitting new applications has past, you can still read our proposal, rate it and make comments:

Thanks in advance. I look forward to reading your thoughts.

Scratch as a Tool for Teaching Computational Journalism

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Scratch in the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers

Scratch is a syntax-free programming  language  created at the Lifelong Learning Lab at MIT to entice novice programmers by making it relatively easy to create annimations, interactive stories and games.  Educators around the world are using Scratch to engage students from elementary school through college.

Our interactive journalism instittute for middle schoolers (funded by the National Science Foundation — grant CNS-0739713) has used Scratch as an essential element in both our instruction and in student work. As part of the preparation for the 2008 summer institute, I created short lessons in Scratch about specific journalism-related topics, including “news sense,” interviewing, and photo journalism. I think the photojournalism lesson is the most technically realized interactive lesson I did last year. Click on the image below to try it out.
Scratch Project

Our undergraduate researchers, who are more advanced “Scratchers” than I,  also created sample lessons, games and templates for stories and infographics.

This year, our PI Ursula Wolz and undergraduate research assistant Brett Taylor, developed a rubric for assessing the computational sophistication of scratch programs. Brett and another research assistant, Chris Hallberg, also created sample scratch lessons to teach specific skills, such as the broadcast command. I look forward to being able to share that information as soon as the team is finished analyzing the data generated from the use of the rubric.

In the meantime, here are some samples of interesting Scratch animations, games and infographics created by our middle schoolers can be viewed at our online magazine website, N.EW.S. (New Ewing Web Stories)