I wrote a lot this week -- well over 20 blog entries at various locations as well a study guide on Breton's Mad Love. I know, I know. Duh. I'm a writer. But I still ended the week with the feeling that I've left a lot of stories untold.
I didn't write about Scratch being removed from the iTunes store, for example. It's an important story on a number of levels: Apple's control of the app market, the rift between consuming and creating content, the education of future geeks.
Scratch is a programming language created by the M.I.T. Media Lab, designed to help teach kids programming. The download is free and runs on Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu. Almost one million projects created with Scratch are posted on their website, a good indication of its popularity, particularly among those who teach our future programmers.
Get that? Our future programmers.
The application in question was actually a Scratch viewer (written not by M.I.T., I should note, but by another developer), designed to show off Scratch projects on an iPad.
Get that? The iPad -- that lightweight computing device that might provide some solid inroads for 1-to-1 computing initiatives.
Apple hasn't responded officially to the application's ouster. In all likelihood, it was removed for violation of the iPhone developer agreement, namely clause 3.3.2 which states that iPhone applications cannot install or launch other executable code. This code has been in the news lately as Apple has taken steps to deny Adobe Flash access to the iPhone platform. As Josh Gruber of Daring Fireball writes, "Imagine a hypothetical arbitrary 'Flash Player' app from Adobe, that allowed you to download SWF files — such an app would stand as an alternative to the App Store. What's frustrating about Apple blocking Scratch is that Scratch doesn't seem like the sort of thing that one could use to build software that's even vaguely of the caliber of native iPhone apps. It's really rudimentary stuff, focused on ease-of-programming. But what's Apple to do?"
Why, keep us safe in their walled garden of course!
Apple has long been the darling of educators. But the famed ease-of-use of Apple's products, I'd argue, isn't sufficient nowadays. It's not enough nowadays to hand the kids the keys to a computer and have them learn to use it. Computing devices -- laptops, desktops, mobile devices -- are ubiquitous, and while yes, it's necessary to teach kids computer skills, I'd contend that it's crucial to offer them computing skills as well.
Students in the US continue to perform rather poorly compared in math and science compared to the rest of the world, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education isn't just important for the sake of test scores. It's the very foundation for innovation in a digital and information-based economy, an economy that rests on these spheres of knowledge.
Get that? We need to help our kids learn math, science, and engineering. Moreover, we need to help them learn how to make technology, not just consume it.
As the Scratch team wrote on their blog, "As we see it, there is nothing more important than empowering the next generation of kids to design, create, and express themselves with new media technologies."
Indeed.