Scratch Launches the Scratch Education Collaborative with 41 Global, Community-Led Organizations
July 20 2021 · By Scratch Team
BOSTON, MA — Scratch, the world’s largest coding community for young people, announced the 41 organizations selected to participate in the first year of the Scratch Education Collaborative (SEC). The SEC is a powerful network of organizations across the world focused on supporting learners from historically marginalized communities in developing their confidence with creative computing.
The SEC met for the first time on July 19, bringing together organizations from 13 countries around the world. The meeting explored topics from the importance of building trust with your program participants to the power of Scratch as a storytelling tool.
During the meeting, Xavier Raimundo of the Creative Community Learning Space Action Partners in Santa Bárbara, Brazil shared how his community has faced challenges from poverty, limited access to technology, and difficulty sourcing materials like cardboard and batteries due to the COVID-19 crisis. Despite these obstacles, his small but dedicated team of volunteers have still been able to engage local students in creative computing. Xavier shared his hope that the partnerships his organization is making through the SEC will open the door for them to have more opportunities, volunteers, and resources, so they can reach even more young people in their area.
In the first year of the SEC, the Scratch Foundation will be hosting workshops focused on topics like creative coding, equity, and community building; leading gatherings for SEC members to connect and collaborate with each other and the Scratch Team; and helping each organization develop an Equity Toolkit that will support them as they grow and scale their support for the learners in their community.
“We look forward to collaborating and engaging with the SEC’s global network of organizations to enhance, develop, and provide HUSD students and their families equity-centered creative computing resources, especially for our students whose promise and genius often get overlooked by outward markers like poverty or language levels,” said Francisco Gallardo of Hayward Unified School District in Hayward, California. “We know [the] SEC will help create learning opportunities to better support and cultivate equitable representation for the next generation of STEAM leaders and educators.”
The SEC will be supported with a $5 million grant from Google.org, building on work Scratch and Google.org began in Chicago Public Schools. In 2019, Scratch and the Office of Computer Science in Chicago Public Schools hosted Family Creative Coding Nights at New Chance Fund elementary schools so that students and their families could come together and create using code.
“Our work in Chicago Public Schools was an important reminder that we can accomplish amazing things when we partner with local organizations that understand their own community’s needs,” said Shawna Young, Executive Director of the Scratch Foundation. “That’s why we're so excited to collaborate with and learn from the organizations in the Scratch Education Collaborative, who are already doing incredible work to bring creative computing to young people in their own communities around the world.”
Below is the full list of organizations and partners participating in year one of the SEC:
Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program – AK, USA
Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub – AR, USA
BootUp PD – UT, USA
Bridges to Science – TX, USA
Center for Cyber Education at Mississippi State University – MS, USA
Creative Community Learning Brasil Space Action Partners / Projeto Social Ação Parceiros – Santa Bárbara, Brazil
Code Club Australia – Sydney, Australia
CodeCrew – Memphis, TN, USA
Deaf Kids Code – NYC, NY, USA
Deaf Technology Foundation – Jos, Nigeria
Digital Harbor Foundation – Baltimore, MD, USA
Faculty of Education Team at University of Johannesburg – Johannesburg, South Africa
Hayward Unified School District – Hayward, CA, USA
Humble Independent School District (ISD) – Humble, TX, USA
iamtheCODE – Guildford, UK
ILCE Instituto Latino Americano de la Comunicación Educativa – México City, MX
Kids Code Jeunesse – Montréal, Canada
Lomie G. Heard Elementary School – Clark County School District, NV, USA
Lutacaga Elementary – Othello School District, WA, USA
Makerere Innovation Society – Uganda
Mouse – NYC, NY, USA
National Society of Black Engineers – USA
NEFSTEM Center, University of North Florida – FL, USA
New York City Department of Education – CSforAllNYC – NYC, NY, USA
New York Hall of Science – NYC, NY, USA
Odyssey Educational Foundation – Nigeria
Play Pattern – Princeton, NJ, USA
Quest Alliance – Bengaluru, India
Schoolnet South Africa – Johannesburg, South Africa
Sistema THEAD – Barcelona, Spain
Sisters of Code – Phnom Penh, Cambodia
STEAMLabs Africa – Nairobi, Kenya
STEM Coding Lab – Pittsburgh, PA, USA
STEM Impact Center Kenya – Nairobi, Kenya
Streetlight Schools – Johannesburg, South Africa
Tanner Elementary – Chicago Public Schools, IL, USA
Teachathon Foundation – Lagos, Nigeria
UdiGitalEdu – Girona, Spain
Ulnooweg – Digital Mi’kmaq – Halifax, Nova Scotia
WeTeach_CS, Center for Cyber Education at University of Texas Austin – USA
Youth for Technology Foundation – Nigeria and Kenya
Partnering Organizations:
Raspberry Pi Foundation – Cambridge, UK
Stanford d. School – Stanford, CA, USA
Chicago Public Schools – IL, USA
Micro:bit Educational Foundation – UK
STEM Nola – New Orleans, LA, USA
Brazilian Creative Learning Network (BCLN) – Brazil
The Tinkering Studio – San Francisco, CA, USA
About Scratch
With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community. Scratch helps young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for life in the 21st century.
Scratch is designed, developed, and moderated by the Scratch Foundation, a nonprofit organization. It is provided free of charge.
About Google.org
Google.org, Google’s philanthropy, brings the best of Google to help solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges combining funding, innovation, and technical expertise to support underserved communities and provide opportunity for everyone. We engage nonprofits and social enterprises who make a significant impact on the communities they represent, and whose work has the potential to produce meaningful change. We want a better world, faster — and we believe in leveraging technology and applying scalable data-driven innovation to move the needle.
Press Contacts
Eric Schilling
Manager of Communications and Digital Media
press@scratch.mit.edu
Annie Whitehouse
Communications Content Manager
press@scratch.mit.edu
This article originally appeared on the Scratch Foundation news section.
