understanding

I went to the MIT Graduate Alumni Webcast: Educating Our Future last night, and I came away with news about a couple interesting projects you might want to check out.

Scratch is a new programming language designed to be easy to teach and learn, very visual, and the web site has some information for teachers about how it can be used in the classroom. This is mostly for the super-geeks, but it looks pretty engaging and fun.

MIT OpenLabWare is based on the same open content ideas as MIT OpenCourseWare, but instead of taking an entire course and putting it online, the focus is on research. It’s just getting started (and I think there’s pretty much one undergrad driving it right now) but the idea is to take a paper and provide additional context to make it more accessible to people who wouldn’t normally just read research papers. See what you think.

There was much more to the webcast, including very exciting footage of the FIRST robotics competitions and talk about chemistry outreach programs, but I really want to promote these two new projects.