A group of schoolchildren in Chile walk on a hillside, using mobile devices to take photos of plants and animals. Later, they use these photos to create animated stories about the local environment.
Meanwhile, two friends in Uganda develop an interactive game featuring an animated chicken that moves across the screen when you tilt the phone and speaks in Swahili when it finds water.
A girl works with her mom to create an animated birthday card for her grandmother, using family photos and singing a personalized birthday greeting into the phone.
All these young people made their projects with a free mobile coding app called OctoStudio, released today by the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Lab. Around the world, more children and teens have access to mobile devices, but many spend hours just watching videos and scrolling through social media. In contrast, OctoStudio encourages young people to use phones and tablets to express themselves creatively and, in the process, learn computational and problem-solving skills.
“We designed OctoStudio to give young people more chances to create projects anytime, anywhere," says Natalie Rusk, the Media Lab research scientist leading the OctoStudio project in the Lifelong Kindergarten group. “We’ve seen how much children learn when they can build on their interests, express their ideas, and share with others.”
OctoStudio builds on decades of research by the Lifelong Kindergarten group, focusing on designing new technologies to engage young people from diverse backgrounds in creative learning. The group previously created Scratch, the world’s most popular coding language for kids, used by tens of millions of young people globally.
OctoStudio is specially designed for children and families in communities where access to computers and the internet is limited, but mobile phones are common. During the design process, the Lifelong Kindergarten team collaborated with educators from Brazil, Chile, India, Korea, Mexico, South Africa, Uganda, and other countries worldwide. To ensure it is accessible to everyone, OctoStudio is completely free and does not require any network connection or data charges.
“Most of my youth don't have Wi-Fi at home. They don't have laptops or desktops. But most of them have access to a cellphone, and that means they also have access to OctoStudio. This will spread the love for creating,” says Dolores Hernandez, who introduced a prototype of OctoStudio to youth at the Clubhouse after-school learning center in San Antonio, Texas.