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!