This year is the 15th anniversary of the launch of the Scratch programming language and online community — and also the 20th anniversary of when my Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Lab started working on Scratch. Scratch has grown beyond what we could have imagined in the…

By Mitchel Resnick (inspired by Olesia Vlasii) Last week, I received a heart-wrenching email message from a Ukrainian educator named Olesia Vlasii. Since then, I have interacted with Olesia several times through email and Zoom. I have been deeply inspired by Olesia’s words and thoughts about the power of kindness…

Perspectives from the Pandemic: A Renewed Appreciation for Connection and Community Fifty years ago, astronauts first walked on the moon. Those journeys changed what people knew about the moon — and, more importantly, how people thought about life on Earth. While traveling to the moon, astronauts sent back photos of the Earth, providing people with a chance, for the first time…

(I wrote this essay as the Foreword to the new edition of Seymour Papert’s classic book Mindstorms.) In re-reading Mindstorms today, 40 years after its publication, I had two conflicting reactions. On one hand, so many of Seymour’s ideas that were seen as radical in 1980 are now part of…

This recoding and text were prepared by Mitchel Resnick for a course on Digital Citizenship and Literacy, organized in Uruguay. Technology-Education-Equity.m4a Voice recording Will digital technologies lead to a more equitable society — or will they worsen the inequities in today’s society? It all depends on how we use the technologies. Unfortunately, many…

This video was prepared for a MIT Media Lab member meeting in June 2020. The past few months have been very unsettling and upsetting. The COVID pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and disrupted the lives of billions of people around the world, with the greatest hardships…

This video and text come from a Scratch project that I created for the Scratch Virtual Graduation in June 2020. I want to congratulate all of the Scratchers who are graduating this year, in 2020. Our research group at MIT started working on Scratch in 2002, around the same…

This essay was originally published in Design.blog in August 2016 When discussing technologies to support learning and education, my mentor Seymour Papert (who, sadly, passed away last month) often emphasized the importance of “low floors” and “high ceilings.” For a technology to be effective, he said, it should provide easy…

The coronavirus crisis highlights the growing need for creativity in today’s society. We need the creativity of public-health professionals to develop strategies for limiting the spread of the virus. We need the creativity of doctors and scientists to develop a vaccine. …