In this hands-on class, you will get to explore CoCo (coco.build), a new platform developed by a team of PhD researchers at MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group. On CoCo, you can co-create, code, and collaborate with peers in real-time across a variety of languages (such as Scratch, p5.js, and others). It also has built-in live audio and video for both remote and in-person co-creation experience. We’ll explore how you can use CoCo to program multiplayer games, collaborative art, stories, animations, music, and also physical computing projects with hardware devices such as Micro:bit and Makey Makey. Link to a short video of the platform in action: https://bit.ly/mit-coco-video About the session leaders: Shruti Dhariwal and Manuj Dhariwal are co-creators of CoCo and doctoral researchers at MIT Media Lab. Their work and research has been featured in MIT News and EdSurge, with young people and educators from 85+ countries signing up for CoCo. Their recent work on “Little Language Models,” an upcoming hands-on AI education microworld within CoCo, was featured by MIT Technology Review.

Curious? Watch ‘Little Language Models’ in action here: https://bit.ly/little-models Little Language Models is a hands-on AI education microworld within CoCo (coco.build)—a new co-creative platform for young people (that builds on top of Scratch). In this session, you’ll get to explore the powerful ideas of probabilistic thinking, modeling, and learning that underlie Generative AI systems and Large Language Models like ChatGPT, through building your own little models. Add your own little data like images, sounds, or text to co-create a variety of playful probabilistic projects with peers—such as generative stories, music, and art; interactive visualizations; teaching a computer how to draw; and more! Little Language Models was recently featured by the MIT Technology Review. About the session leaders: Shruti Dhariwal and Manuj Dhariwal are doctoral researchers at MIT Media Lab, and co-creators of CoCo and Little Language Models. Their work and research has been featured in MIT Technology Review and EdSurge, with young people and educators from 85+ countries signing up for CoCo.

CoCo (https://coco.build) is a new platform being developed at MIT that lets young people engage in an endless variety of collaborative creative coding experiences, WITH PEERS IN REAL-TIME! It supports a variety of expressive computational environments that include both block-based and text-based coding (building on top of Scratch 3.0 and p5.js). In this session, you’ll get to explore firsthand the beta version of the platform and try all the exciting new features and co-creative possibilities! CoCo has been featured in MIT News (https://bit.ly/coco-mit-news) and young people and educators from 75+ countries have joined the invite list to use the platform. CoCo is being co-developed by Manuj Dhariwal and Shruti Dhariwal, PhD students at MIT Media Lab in the Lifelong Kindergarten Research Group (where the Scratch programming platform was originally developed).

Come and explore the new Let’s Chance extension in Scratch, and tinker with ideas of probability and randomness by creating projects with an element of unpredictability! Using the extension’s new code blocks, you can now create a virtual dice in Scratch with any number of sides—each side can be a sound, costume, text, number, or even some real world data. You can dynamically change the chance and likelihood of different outcomes, and make your projects react differently each time you roll one or more dice. Hook the extension with other Scratch extensions such as, Video Sensing, Music, or Text-to-Speech for lots of playful possibilities. Create projects like— generative music, art, or text; chance-based games/stories/animations; interactive visualizations; teaching a computer how to draw, and many others!

Come and explore the new ‘Let’s Chance’ extension in Scratch (scratch.mit.edu), and tinker with ideas of probability and randomness by creating projects with an element of unpredictability! Using the extension’s new blocks, you can now create a virtual dice in Scratch with any number of sides—each side can be a sound, costume, text, number, or even some real world data. You can dynamically change the chance and likelihood of different outcomes, and make your projects react differently each time you roll one or more dice. Hook the extension with other Scratch extensions such as, Video Sensing, Music, or Text-to-Speech for lots of playful possibilities. Create projects like—chance-based games/stories/animations; generative art/text/music; interactive visualizations; data-based simulations; teaching a computer how to draw, and many others!