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
Mesh Inc.
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
