expressing their concern about others “copying” their work. This controversy has provided an opportunity to discuss important ideas and differences between plagiarism and sharing.
co
CREATIVE OBJECT
COMMUNITY
Scratch users build on one another's projects through “creative appropriation.”
IDEA
SCRATCH PROJECT
SCRATCH PROJEC TS REPOSITORY
USER- T FORUMS GENERATED
METADATA
Scratch users contribute to (and learn from) the online community in many ways.
March + April 2008
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in the community. One of these trends was started by an interactive “dress up” project created by an 11-year-old girl from South Africa. The project was a digital version of a traditional paper doll: The viewer could choose the skin color, hair, and clothing of the doll. Projects tagged as “dress up” are so popular that they often go to the “Top Viewed” section of the front page with hundreds if not thousands of views. To date, there are more than 150 projects tagged as “dress up.” Ranging from a project about dressing up a hero to dressing up a famous TV star and original characters, “dress up” projects are as diverse as their creators.
The Scratch website serves as a repository of code and ideas that can be creatively appropriated to spawn new ideas and new projects. The Scratch website and the Scratch desktop environment make it very easy for this to happen. Fifteen percent of all of the 23,394 projects shared (as of August 14, 2007) were remixes of other projects. Of those, the types of changes made ranged from simple changes to images and sounds, to modifications of the actual programming code.
Every time a project gets shared on the Scratch website, the Scratch desktop application adds information about who shared the project and when. This information is used to automatically connect projects that are based on others. When a project is a remix of another, it displays a link to the original project, giving credit to the creator whose work has been remixed. Several members of the community have posted messages in the online forums
One of the early and ongoing collaborative efforts on the Scratch online community started when a 15-year-old girl from the U.K., screen name BeeBop, created a series of projects with animated sprites and encouraged others to use them in their projects. “You can take any of these to use in your own project, or you can post a comment saying what you want and I can make it for you,” BeeBop explained. The same day, a 10-year-old girl, using the name MusicalMoon, wrote a comment saying that she liked BeeBop’s animations and asking if BeeBop could create a project with “a mountain background from a bird’s-eye view” for use in one of her own projects. MusicalMoon also asked BeeBop to submit the project to Mesh Inc., a “miniature company” that MusicalMoon had created to produce “top quality games” in Scratch. MusicalMoon explained that “all you do is simply send in a project, I will review it back in the Mesh gallery, and, then, if it’s good enough, I will grant you a member of Mesh_Inc.!” MusicalMoon and BeeBop continued their exchanges and created an initial version of a collaborative project.
A few days later, Hobbit, the 14-year-old boy from New Jersey, discovered the Mesh Inc. gallery and offered his services: “I’m a fairly good programmer, and I could help with de-bugging and stuff.” MusicalMoon asked Hobbit
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