 So welcome to Scratch Conference 2018. It's really great to have so many people from so many places joining us here at the Media Lab. It's great to see a lot of longtime friends who've been using and supporting Scratch for so many years. In some ways, the conference feels a little bit like a family reunion. You can see it last night with people getting back together and hugging one another. At the same time, it's great to see so many new faces and people joining. Some of them just getting started with Scratch. I want to welcome them to the Scratch family and really look forward to the next few days to have the opportunity for all of us to be sharing ideas and exchanging stories and learning from one another. I really felt that last night, the reception kicked things off in a really special way that for me it highlighted the diversity of the Scratch community. At the end of the evening, as I thought back about the conversations I had during the evening, I realized I talked to people from more than 25 countries. I actually counted them up from Mexico to Brazil to Chile to France to Poland to Italy to Morocco to Nigeria, Kenya, China, Japan, Korea, all over the world and many more. So it's just really exciting to have people coming together. But it's not just the geographic diversity. Through those conversations, it was great to see all the different ways that people around the world are using Scratch. I remember talking to one teacher from an all girls elementary school in Mexico and she was telling me about how in their class, the second graders are creating interactive bracelets using Scratch to program micro bits to flash hearts and other patterns. And I talked to a teacher from Austria who's really had a deep commitment to supporting the culture of integrity and respect in this classroom. So he really engages his kids in using the Scratch online community where they're diving in and getting a deeper understanding of the opportunities and importance and also the challenges of building an inclusive and respectful community. And I talked to one retired teacher from Detroit here in the United States who actually had never used Scratch in her classroom but after retiring, she learned Scratch from her granddaughter and now was working on Scratch projects throughout the whole day as translating them for her relatives in Spain and in Italy and looking to see how she can start developing some professional development opportunities so she can share her enthusiasm with other teachers. So to me, it's clear that there's a real incredible, diverse and extraordinary collection of people here and I really can't wait to have more conversations over the next few days. As we started planning this conference, I realized that this conference is falling almost exactly 10 years after our very first Scratch conference. It was July 24th, 2006, 2008, almost to the day 10 years ago. And through those 10 years, obviously a lot has changed in those 10 years. At the first Scratch conference, we had about 200 people. This year we have about 600 people who were bursting at the seams and we could have a lot more. As many of you know, we sold out a few months ahead of time. 10 years ago at the first Scratch conference, there was about 150,000 projects shared in the Scratch community and we thought that was a lot. Today there's more than 37 million projects shared in the community and every day there's about 30,000 new projects. So every five days there's as many projects shared as in the whole first year of Scratch. Also in that 10 years ago, the focus was really just on Scratch and today there's all these different Scratch-associated initiatives with from Scratch Ed to Scratch Junior to Scratch Day and have opportunities in the next few days to learn a lot more about all of those other initiatives. So I really, as we move forward with this, I think that there's, even though some things have changed a lot in the last 10 years, there are a lot of things that have really stayed the same that we've really, some things that haven't changed and important things that haven't changed are the goals and the motivations and the values to underlie our work on Scratch. From the very beginning, we saw Scratch as more than just a programming language. We saw it as a way to provide children around the world an opportunity to express themselves creatively and to develop as creative thinkers. We've taken seriously the idea of Scratch as a new type of literacy. So we really always are working hard and we want kids to be able to, we want to provide them with opportunities to express their ideas and to organize their ideas and to share their ideas with others just as they do when they're learning to write. And I think as we do that, we see that it's one of the most important ways that kids that for all kids need these new opportunities. It's not just for a limited number, but these types of capabilities of expressing and organizing and sharing ideas are important for everyone from all backgrounds in all parts of the world. So we've had this deep commitment to make sure that Scratch is always accessible and appealing and empowering to all children in all places and in all backgrounds. Now, of course, as Scratch continues to grow and change and extend itself around the world, there's some real challenges of how we can stay true to those values and to its mission. I think that's one of the big challenges ahead of us to make sure that we stay true to it so that Scratch isn't just used to teach some particular concepts as important they may be, but to provide opportunities for children to develop their thinking and to develop their voice. And we know that's not easy to do. It's a lot easier to just spread the technology than to spread the ideas and the values. But I think that's one reason I'm so excited about having all of us together for the Scratch conference, was the conference provides us an opportunity to all of us to come together and to share ideas and to share stories of how children are creating and sharing with Scratch and health and strategies for supporting them. So there'll be lots of opportunities over the next few days for all of you to be sharing ideas with one another, but maybe just to start, let's take just a couple minutes, we'll take two or three minutes just to talk to people around you, to introduce yourself and to share what you're doing with Scratch and some of the things you're hoping to learn from the conference. So we'll gather another just two, three minutes. So I hope you were able to get started on conversation. There'll be lots more opportunities over the next few days to continue. As you know, the theme of this year's conference is the next generation. And part of it, of what brings us together, is I think all of us have this deep commitment to supporting the next generation of children, to provide them with opportunities to imagine, create and share so that they can help shape the future. And I think if we really wanna get an appreciation of how children are using Scratch to imagine, create and share, it's best to hear from the children themselves to hear their stories and their voices. So I'd like to share three stories of three Scratchers, three members of the Scratch community. And the first story comes from a Scratchers username is Cool Jules. And we first found out about Cool Jules when she responded to a prompt that was put up by Natalie Rusk in the Scratch community. And Natalie posted a question to Scratchers saying, why do you scratch? And asked them to post projects about why do they scratch? And hundreds of kids posted projects explaining what brought them to Scratch. And then a graduate student in our group, Shruti Darwal, collected some of those stories into a lovely book called Why Do Scratches Scratch? So I'll be telling the story that Shruti captures from Why Do Scratches Scratch. And this is the project that Cool Jules had shared on the community. And I'll show some screenshots that were then put in the book where Cool Jules talks about why she scratches. And she says, you know, so why do I scratch? Scratch is something I can express myself with and share my creativity, ideas, inspirations and art with. You can make anything here from art to a game and so much more. The possibilities are endless. The whole community is amazing and you make so many friends here. Everybody here is so kind, creative and accepting. To be really honest, I never thought I'd be into coding until I found Scratch. It was love at first sight. And I think Cool Jules is exactly the type of young person we're trying to attract as we created Scratch. As I read through Cool Jules' story, it made me think about some of the principles that we've had for guiding us as we develop Scratch. We sometimes call them the four P's of creative learning. Projects, passion, peers and play. As I read Cool Jules' story, to me it seemed that her learning and her creativity really were supported by projects, passion, peers and play. That she was working on projects based on her passions in collaboration with peers in a playful spirit. And I think that's what really helped her develop her ability to express herself creatively and to think creatively. And for me, I think this is a key as we all try to spread this spirit and the values of Scratch around the world, these four P's can serve as a guiding framework. We can all work to see how can we better support young people to work on projects based on their passions in collaboration with peers in a playful spirit. I'll go on to my second story. Highlights a young person in the community whose Scratch username is forever and his real name is Jin Ho. And here's a video that was made actually Chanfika Fernando and Eric Shilling in our group working with video highlighting some of the ways that Jin Ho was interacted in Scratch. I remember reading the news and thinking that I should do something about this but I didn't know what I should do about it. And then I listened to this song, Hands. It featured different artists coming together and singing a song together. And I thought, why couldn't we as Scratchers create something together? I have a multi-animator project that we Scratchers made together after the Orlando tragedy that happened to honor the people who died in the Orlando tragedy. This project is a multi-animator project which means that each part was animated by a different animator and we all stitched it together to create the final product. I think around 40 or 50 people were involved making that project. Scratch is a really open place where you can like share anything you want and you can express your feelings however you want and I think that's a really beautiful part of it. And I hope for the project when I shared it with the community was to be able to reach out to some of the other people in this generation and know that there are people who support them and yeah. If you look at the project, clearly you can see that Jin Ho and his colleagues and that he worked with on this are developing lots of computational skills. Also they're clearly being guided by those four P's of working on a project that was clearly based on passions in this collaborative multi-animator project working with peers and experimenting in new ways in a playful spirit. But I think as we look at this project we also to me it brings to mind a fifth pay. The P of purpose. I think this time that we see more and more of young people using Scratch to work on projects that they really want to try to make a difference in the world to see how they can work on things that really make a difference in their community. And this time I think we're thinking about more in fact there's a session at the conference about the fifth P of purpose. And then something else we want to continue to think about of adding purpose to the project's passion peers and play. I'll tell my third and final story and there's a story about a project by a scratcher with the username ZeptoPower006 who's on the autism spectrum and shared this project as a way of sort of sharing some of his thoughts about his interactions in the world. So let me share the project with you. My name is Alex and this is my story. Some of my favorite hobbies are playing video games and drawing. I've been creating comics for a very long time. I'm very good at math and coding. I'm very funny, kind and smart. I also have autism. Autism affects me in many ways. It makes me think different. Sometimes in math I would solve problems in ways that even my teachers didn't think of. You think they know it but no. Sometimes what I need to think, I pace. It helps me concentrate and it's called stimming. My teachers let me do this because it helps me think. Autism makes me a very picky eater. I like crunchy foods and I don't like mushy foods because they make me gag. The texture of the food bothers my senses. My senses are super charged and sometimes that makes me feel uncomfortable. Sometimes I get really overwhelmed by bad feelings and I just want people to be understanding and patient. It's okay to be different. However, some people don't treat different people very nicely. And there's just so much no with that decision. I wish people would treat different people completely normally. Being different makes the world more diverse. If everyone was the same, then the world would not be very interesting. I think that the secret to a good life is to just you be you. Pick your path and accept others for which path they choose. Be kind. That is my story. That was one of my favorite scratch projects from the last few years because for me it really captured some of the essence of what we're trying to do and provide opportunities for everyone from all backgrounds to develop their voice and to share their ideas. And the way it says U-B-U, that's what we want to do with scratch. We want everyone to U-B-U. That we know there are many different pathways that kids are going to engage in the world and trying to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to be themselves and to find their own pathways to be able to live up to their full potential. So I think in all of these projects from Cool Jules to Jinho Forever to Zepto Power 006, I think they sort of captured some of the spirit of scratch. And for those of us on the scratch team here at MIT, as we look at projects like this, and of course there are millions of others like this on the website. I just chose these a few examples. You know, we get lots of, we're always taken by surprise by the type of things kids do that we never imagined. And we're always amazed and delighted and inspired by what is the kids do. And we're always trying to take it into account as we think about extending and further developing scratch, whether it's the software or the community or the activities, try taking inspiration from members of the scratch community. And that really brings us to another aspect of the theme of the next generation. Because as many of you know, we've been working on a next generation of scratch itself that we call Scratch 3.0. And I think we've always been inspired by the community that we really want to make sure that we develop a next generation of scratch that's worthy of the next generation of kids. So we've been working hard at it where there's no team here, work on it, you hope you have a chance through the conference to meet some of the couple dozen people or work on Scratch here. But I'd like to then sometime to give an update on some of the things we work on Scratch to invite three leaders of the team to come join me on stage, Andrew Sluwinski and Natalie Rusk and Chempica Fernando. I think we'll start with Andrew who's been leading the team, developing this next generation of scratch. Lee, it's a big design and engineering effort. So Andrew will give a bit of update about some of the thinking that's gone into the work on Scratch 3.0 and the sneak peek of some of the things with it. Sure, so thank you. So I think as Mitch was just saying when we look around the Scratch community, we see just such an incredible diversity of the things that kids are making. And it's incredibly inspiring. And when we look at the kind of scale that we're reaching, over the last 12 months, both the online and offline versions of Scratch have been used by over 200 million kids. That's a whole heck of a lot of kids. But when we think about our mission, we're really thinking about how do we make sure that all of these kids are reaching and being touched by the big, powerful ideas that underlie our work that Mitch was just talking about. And so when we were thinking about the next generation of Scratch, I think the question for us was really, and the foundational goal for us was really how do we make sure that we're reaching kids where they're at? How do we make sure that these opportunities are available for all children everywhere from all backgrounds? And so a major way in which we do that is we use the creative learning spiral that some of you may have seen before, where we hope that kids who are using Scratch are imagining, creating, playing, sharing, and reflecting as they're using Scratch, as they're doing these creative learning activities. But in the same way, that same process can be used to describe our process for how we develop Scratch, for how we build Scratch, for how we interact with children, see the way that they're using, the types of tools that we're building for them and make it better, make it stronger, make sure that these powerful ideas are accessible to all. And so when we think about the goals that we have for the next generation of Scratch that we call Scratch 3.0, really the primary foundation really is this idea of reaching kids where they are. And there's a lot of different dimensions of that. There's everything from making sure that Scratch is easy enough to use, that it's intuitive, that it's easy to pick up and start to play with and start to have a creative, tinkerable experience with. But it also talks about localization and accessibility in all of these different dimensions that are so important for us to fulfill our mission. So when we look at Scratch 3.0 as it is today, we're really excited about the progress and really excited that at the conference there's gonna be lots of opportunities for you folks to take a look at this next generation of Scratch. And when you look at the coding area, so this is Scratch 3.0, it still kinda looks and feels like Scratch, but the team has done a lot of work to make a lot of these refinements, to make things simpler, to make it easier to kind of get started, to make it easier to really go from zero to hello world and then hello world to woe. Like we wanna get kids to that moment of joy, that moment of seeing the possibilities in Scratch. And we've done a lot of work in the coding side of things, but we also know that Scratch is more than just a programming language. There's also a paint editor, which is incredibly important, as you just saw in some of the projects that Mitch just showed. And the team's done a great job of refining a lot of the paint editor to make it easier to get started with, but also to make it a little bit more powerful so that kids can do the types of animations that they wanna do. And also to make some of the features of the paint editor that today are a little bit tricky to get working with, things like gradients, and try to make those more accessible, make those easier for all kids to use. Another place where we've spent a lot of time is sound. And the team really sort of took a step back and through doing a lot of workshops with kids, tried to look at how are kids using sound in Scratch? What are the opportunities for us to sort of transform sound from something that you just kind of grab from the library and add to your project to something that you can play with, something that you can tinker with, something that you can really have fun with, make that a part of the medium as well. And another area where we've spent a lot of time is the actual libraries themselves. So in addition to adding a whole bunch of new sprites and sounds and backdrops to the library, we've also spent a lot of time making the libraries a little bit easier to use and introducing search into the libraries, which is something that we all know from our experience working with kids that kids find incredibly intuitive just to be able to search for what they're looking for. And on the library side, we were lucky enough to be able to partner with a large number of incredibly talented artists. Some of those artists are actually Scratchers to produce new assets for the library. So now we're making sure that we have everything from food trucks to boomboxes to toucans to zebras, really making sure that we're going broad with the range of interest that kids bring to Scratch. And last but not least, I think one of the other parts that's really important about reaching kids where they are is making sure that we're on the platforms where kids are. So Scratch 3.0 is the first version of Scratch that we've ever had that works on desktop devices just as it does today, but it also works on touch devices, including Android and iOS tablets as well as Chromebooks. And later, early next year, when we launch the full version of Scratch, you'll also, this will be the first version of Scratch where you'll also be able to play Scratch projects on your phone. I think one of the other major pieces of Scratch 3.0 and one of the big, big goals for us has been expanding the possibilities of what Scratch can do. We know that so many kids love making games, they love making animations, they love making multiplayer projects, they love doing all of these different things, they love making pen projects, you name it. But we also know that there's a lot more opportunity out there and we've seen through our testing and through working with kids just how excited they can get when we connect Scratch to hardware, when we connect Scratch to the physical world, when we connect Scratch to things like speech. And so we've spent a lot of time developing a new platform within Scratch 3.0 called extensions that really change the possibilities and expand what you can do with Scratch. So one of the first examples that I'm gonna show, and hopefully this all works, is we've been really excited about working with the MicroBit team on our integration with the MicroBit. And one of the things that I'm really excited to show you is kind of how that works. So let's build a little project here. So I'm gonna add the space backdrop and then I'm going to get rid of the cat. I'm gonna replace the cat with a dog. Hopefully that's okay. So I'm gonna search for dog and I get all the dogs and now I have dot and so down here in the bottom left hand corner, this is the extensions library. So I'm gonna click on that and then I'm gonna connect to the MicroBit. I'm gonna make sure that my MicroBit is powered on. It's gonna look for devices. I'm gonna connect it, connected. And now that it's connected, what I can do is just start to really quickly build an interactive program so I can connect the A button press to just playing the sound of bark. And I can make another little stack here and I'm gonna use another new feature, which is changing sound effects. So I can change the pitch effect and I can change that to the tilt angle of the MicroBit. And so now if I start this stack, we can go and we can move our little puppy here and let's add a little bit more interactivity. We'll make dot the dog, the space dog move and we'll activate this. And now we can go very musical dog. And so just using something as simple as that, we can go from zero to a playful experience really, really quickly. And I think that's trying to deliver on both the simplicity of scratch, but also expanding the possibilities of what kids can do, right? And using low cost hardware like the MicroBit, we really see a lot of potential. And the MicroBit is by no means the only hardware extension or software extension that we're working on. MicroBit is one of many. So MicroBit's been a great partner for us, but we're also working with folks like Lego and Sphero and the Raspberry Pi folks are here, who we're also working on extending, scratching to the physical world with all of these different types of platforms. And then on the software side, there's also a bunch of really tremendous opportunities for us to extend scratch to do things like speech recognition or text to speech or object detection, all sorts of different things that we're working on with different types of software partners like Amazon Web Services and Google. But that's by no means the end, this is just the beginning of what we're working on right now. And so I guess a few frequently asked questions is kind of the next piece. One of the questions that I know that you folks are gonna ask me is when can you get access to this? I'm very happy to say you can get to it right now. So the team pushed this live yesterday, so you can go to beta.scratch.mit.edu and use that during the conference. And there's going to be a whole bunch of different workshops and sessions that'll be using this beta throughout the next couple of days. The other big question is when will the full version launch, right? Like when will it be available in the community for all kids to use? And the answer for that is January 2nd. So right after the new years. And one thing that you'll notice on here is the beta, we're actually not going to, you all are getting like a special preview of it today, but the beta will actually become available for all kids on the Scratch community on August 1st, so next Wednesday. And we're really excited and the kids are also very excited, so. And I think last but not least. And also just to be clear, and the beta when it comes out will be separate from the community, so people can do that, but they can still go to the current Scratch website to continue to share things in the community and they'll be integrated into the community on January. Yep, on January 2nd, the Scratch 3.0 will become the sort of foundation for the community as well. And then last but not least is how can I learn more about Scratch 3.0 at the conference? So there's a lot of different opportunities. There's a whole range of different sessions. Today there's two workshops that many of you have signed up for that are now full Scratch 3.0 workshops, but have no fear, there's lots of other opportunities as well. Tomorrow there are gonna be multiple Scratch 3.0 studios happening in theCUBE with a whole bunch of different members of the Scratch 3.0 design and development team and resources team supporting that. And then in addition to that, on Saturday we have a special session that's going to be a whole bunch of members of the actual team that built Scratch 3.0 on a panel together, talking a little bit about the process, talking a little bit about the design and answering questions that you might have. So if you wanna learn more about extensions or you have questions about how we built 3.0 or have questions about the process, that would be a great session for you. And then last but not least, I think the most important thing is to look for the orange ask me buttons that a lot of members of the team are all wearing. And if you have questions, if you see us during lunch or during dinner or any other time, feel free to ask us questions and we'd be happy to chat about it. Thanks. Great, okay, thanks Andrew. Yeah, I mean, as we introduce Scratch 3.0, of course we wanna make sure that there are lots of ways to help kids and educators get started with Scratch. So we've been putting a lot of thought into how can we better support those introductory experiences and what type of resources and support materials can we provide to help support people who are just getting started. So Natalie Rusk, we'll talk about that. Natalie has been working on the Scratch project since day one, since before I even had the name Scratch and has led a lot of the efforts in learning research around Scratch and leading up the development of resources around Scratch. So our resource team, we now have a great Scratch learning resource team and our challenge is really how do you design learning resources that spark that creative learning, those four P's. And some of the things that I wanna share with you and that we're gonna be interested in sharing with you throughout the conference are some of those ideas that we've been working on and it's been inspired by some of you have used the Scratch coding cards. So these cards, and these were really developed with this idea that were inspired by actually Seymour Papert's ideas about that education has little to do with explanation and how do you dive in. He also talked about how using ideas comes before understanding them. So rather than explaining the concepts, how do you have something that right away, oh, I wanna make this happen. I wanna make something jump around. How do I do that? And on the back it has some coding and it shows you how do I do that and we've been doing it in different interest areas and a lot of these are inspired by projects that we see young people on the community making like virtual pets. Okay, that's a topic that has sparked a lot of interest and ideas and thinking. So how do we make that available to more people through these Scratch coding cards that have been available and now thanks to a lot of you translated into different languages. So how do we bring that so that when someone opens up Scratch 3.0 they can have a similar experience of just diving in and starting to play. So yeah, we've also had these educator guides that help show how do you use those cards. So here in Scratch 3.0 you're gonna find a whole set of tutorials that have that idea of just diving in and getting started and I'm gonna show you in Scratch. So in Scratch you'll now find there's a button at the top that says tutorials. Finding my cursor, there it is. So if you click on that there's a little light bulb next to it. You'll get popping up choices and these are just the beginning we're gonna be expanding on it but let's see for example how do I change size of something? And if I look at that I can play the video. With a change size block you can make a sprite get bigger or smaller. To keep going, you can use a repeat loop or type in a minus sign to get smaller and smaller. To reset size, you can use the set size block. 100 will get it back to the original size or try a bigger or smaller number depending on what you want. Choose your own sprite and try it out. So we're hoping that that will help not just a little short thing but it gives you some sense of some idea and some concept to start playing around with with your own things. We also have in the tutorial window some of the more starter projects. Like how would I get started on making something? So that's one thing I can start trying out but how would I do something like making a game or animating my name or making music? So these also you'll see if you play it has a video that shows you what are some possibilities that you could do and then you can see what are the steps and just right here in the editor without going anywhere else you can start following along. It just has enough again to hopefully spark interest, get ideas started and then seeing how young people start remixing using their own ideas and just building on these ideas. So we're looking forward to again at the Scratch Studio, we'll be sharing those and talking about it. You can just start exploring those at the beta.scratch. And just a really important mention as I said that these have been translated into other languages and right now the current version of Scratch is translated thanks to a lot of you in the community translated into more than 50 languages. Scratch 3 is getting there and a lot of you also have been working on that. We could really use more translators and also more reviewers if you speak a language to see okay is this making sense and we especially need people like you who've tried out Scratch, who've used it with young people, what are the words that really make sense for localizing this? So this is both for the resources and for this and to find out more about that and just to talk to us, we'd love to meet those of you who've been working on it or interested in contributing. There's gonna be a poster today at 4.30 to 5.30 on the third floor. If you can't make it then there's also an email, you can email our translation team at translate at scratch.mit.edu and let us know what you're interested in doing and we'll connect with you. Thanks. Thanks. And with all the things we're trying to do, even though the Scratch team here has been growing, we know we can't do things by ourselves. The same way we're reaching out to partner with others on translation, we are having a growing number of ways of collaborations and partnerships and that's one thing that Chempica will talk about. Chempica has contributed to the team in many different ways over the years. She actually was helping on the team that put out Scratch 2.0 and helped in the development of Scratch 2.0, went away for a while, was a student for a while, came back and is now heading up a lot of the efforts in outreach and communications and she'll talk about some of the work we're doing and connecting with others around the world. Thanks. All right, thanks Mitch. So I'm gonna bring it full circle back to community, what Mitch was talking about in the beginning and so just to reiterate, when we think about Scratch, when we talk about Scratch, it's not just the programming language and the editor, it's this massive global community, all of you who share our ideas and this commitment to the next generation of kids and next generation of creators. And so I wanna take a moment and just highlight, you've heard some of the things that we're working on with the Scratch 3.0, but I'm gonna take a moment and highlight some of the things you guys are doing in the community. And so I'll start, actually I'll start with a few organizations that we've had the opportunity to work with to make sure that when Scratch 3.0 comes out, there's lots and lots of really great free resources available. So our friends at Harvard on the Scratch Ed team have been working to update their creative computing curriculum guides so that it's ready for Scratch 3.0 when it launches in January. Our friends over at Code Club, sponsored by the Raspberry Pi Foundation are working on updating all of their tutorials and activities online so that all the Code Clubs around the world will have updated resources for Scratch 3.0 as well. CS First, our friends at Google will be updating all of their video tutorials to make sure that those are ready. And we've been continuing to do our work with Cartoon Network to create some new tutorials around Scratch 3.0 using their characters, some of my favorites, the Powerpuff Girls. But, and you know, we feel really lucky to be working with some of these really amazing organizations but we're actually even more inspired by the thousands of other folks, including many of you in the room who are producing resources and materials for your local communities. And so actually if you do do that, we would love to hear about the resources that you're creating. If you go to this link, bit.ly, slash scratch dash resource dash developers, you can fill out a form and tell us about the resources you're developing and also join our resource developers mailing list so that we can keep you updated on sort of the development of Scratch 3.0 and how you can think about updating your resources and getting them ready for the launch. And so it's not just resources and activities that people are producing and sort of that's not the only way people in the community are engaged. Some of you may have been to or even hosted your own Scratch Day. These are activities that are hosted all around the world in homes, community centers, schools, offices, and they're organized around, they're one day activities that bring together kids, parents, families to create and share around Scratch. And the first one was actually hosted here at MIT and then in 2009, we put out resources for how to host your own and since then, it's grown to be this global thing that's hosted all around the world and actually this year, there's been already more than a thousand that have been hosted in more than 60 countries around the world. And of course, there's a Scratch conference which is where you are right now in case you didn't know. And that again, the first one was hosted as much said here at MIT with the idea of bringing together educators to share ideas and learn from one another. And each year, it's been hosted either here at MIT or elsewhere, there's been one Scratch conference. But last year, there were actually half a dozen Scratch conferences hosted all around the world, led by people in the community. And so that, we found that really inspiring. And so, and at this year's Scratch conference, we actually got more than 400 proposals and it's just really inspiring to see all the different ways people are using Scratch in their local communities. You can't really read that schedule but the schedule's out on the wall there and you'll have it in your booklet. We hope you'll check out a lot of the sessions and meet new people, share ideas and take things away with you that you can use in your own communities. But even if you're not hosting a session at the Scratch conference this year, we wanna hear your stories. And so some of the folks on the team have come up with these prompts to help you think about sharing your story. And actually, you'll find at lunch today these Scratch cards, these little cards with questions on them that help you think about how you can share your story. And there's a few different ways we want you to think about doing that. So at lunch, at your table, you can share, you can start a conversation with the person next to you at your table, talk about how you're using Scratch. You can also, we'll have a kiosk set up on the fifth floor where if you feel inspired, you can go and record your story. And then if you wanna tell the world, you can go on Twitter and share your story with the hashtag, hashtag Scratch Stories. So we hope that you'll share what you're working on. We'd love to learn from you and we hope that you'll share with one another. And again, I just wanna, I'll end on saying sort of, as we think about the future of Scratch and all the things with Scratch through Pono, we're really excited to think about how the community will grow along with us. Okay, thanks a lot, thank you guys. So we're gonna wrap up with giving you a little bit of an overview and guide to the conference as we're getting started with the conference. But I think to navigate the conference might require some little guidance. So one thing that was helpful, Champika mentioned, in the back of your name tag, there is a little guide if you haven't seen already that you can pull out that is your conference guide. In there, you'll see one thing is a quick overview, a quick, the conference at a glance. So I just wanna say a few things about this. So you'll see Thursday, Friday, Saturday and each day we'll be starting with the keynote session like this one. So we'll be in this hall to get started on Friday and Saturday with the keynote session. And then there'll be various parallel sessions. We see the morning and afternoon sessions. There'll be more than a dozen things happening in parallel. At those sessions, you'll be able to look at the listing also in the program to choose different things to go to. And as we do this, the three days are somewhat different. Today is a little different in that all of the sessions, the breakout sessions are all workshops today. In the future days, there'll also be night talks and panel discussions. We thought it was great in the spirit of scratch to get started with more hands-on participatory sessions on day one. So there'll be 90 minute sessions, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. These were ones that you were asked to register for ahead of time. So in your name tag, you should have tickets for the two sessions you registered for. If you didn't, you should be able to pick up some extra tickets at registration or just go to the tables right outside here if you don't have a ticket. But for today, you need to go to the sessions that are registered for. If you're not registered yet, pick up a ticket at the tables right outside the hall and go there. For the next couple of days, for Friday and Saturday, the sessions will be going in parallel and just be going around no pre-registration, but just go to the sessions you're interested in. We hope people will be understanding. As you can tell from, we had these several overflow sessions at rooms. We really tried to accommodate as many people as possible. There was such demand for the conference. We somewhat stretched to the limit. So we're doing our best to handle it. We really wanted to try to let as many people come because it's great that so many people are interested. It does mean we have a large number of people. Some of the sessions might get filled up. So hopefully it'll be patient understanding. If the session is filled up, there doesn't other great sessions you can go to. There'll always be sessions at each of the slots in this room, in the auditorium across the hall, in a large auditorium next door. You'll be able to accommodate large numbers of people. So there'll be some places that you'll always be able to get into. So hope you'll be understanding as you try to select among sessions on Friday and Saturday. I mentioned some things next door. So I want to say a few things. Oh wait, sorry, before that, I do want to say each of those time slots, we're also going to have there about, 13 or 14 scheduled sessions, but also a couple of conference sessions. On the wall right outside the hall, there's a whiteboard where you can decide to sign up for an on-conference session, sort of an impromptu session. On there you can write it up. And I think if you see something similar, you can sort of write your name next to it. So hopefully we can use this board where people can sort of match up, find things going on with similar interests and line up together around these on-conference sessions in two different rooms. Now I'll mention a little about navigating, which in past conferences, it was almost everything was in this building, which is called E14 in MIT speak. But in order to accommodate more people this time, we're also connecting, there's a building that's connected, the original Media Lab building, which is E15. So workshops and other sessions will be going on in both of those two buildings. So the bottom row here is E15, oh sorry, E14, the building we're in right now. To situate yourself, this is six floors. So as you go across, it shows the different floors. So right now we're on the sixth floor. And this is like conference central. So this is where all the meals will be, the lunches, the breakfast, the dinner on Friday night will be here. And some of the larger rooms for the sessions here on the sixth floor. There's also in this building down to the third floor is one of the overflow rooms. So some of you are probably watching this right now. Down to the third floor atrium, that's another large space that we'll have for overflow and also some of the poster sessions will be there. We also on the fifth floor have a scratch lounge, a place just to go hang out. It's also where the kiosk will be for sharing your scratch stories that Chempika mentioned. But then you can see scattered through the map, there are all sorts of other rooms in both buildings. So if we try to think about how to navigate through, there's also the other building. And notice the arrows here, the two buildings are next to each other, but they're only two floors connected. So trying to give you the way I generally think about it, if you wanna get to something in the other building, go to the third or the fourth floor, cut across the other building, and that's the way to move between them. So if you wanna get from the sixth floor down to the other building, you go down to, there's elevators and stairs, lots of different elevators and stairs, go down, cut across third or fourth floor, go to elevators and stairs in the other building and cut across. So in the other building, in E-15, there's here the different places to cut across. In E-15, as Andrew mentioned, the Scratch 3.0 studio is in the lower level of the other building. So it's about as far, like diagonally across, from here, if you can't go diagonally. So you'll go across, across and down into the lower level. Also the lower level of the other building is where the other poster session will be. So hopefully you'll be able to figure out how to navigate around. We also have some navigation cards. Outside this room, there are little cards that will tell you how to get from the sixth floor of this building, right here, to any of the other spaces. So if you're going to somewhere, pick up a card, follow the directions on how to get there. Again, a lot of these were done by, we had two great organizers, Kate Shanahan and Kate Strauss, who designed or Trish, who worked on a lot of these things to help us, you know, help people figure their way around. Also, as Andrew mentioned, members of the Scratch team and some other volunteers were asking me buttons. So if you have trouble finding your way around, have other questions, just look for some of the ask me button. You can also tweet, ask MIT, and we'll have somebody looking at that and hopefully they'll be able to answer questions for you as well. There should be Wi-Fi through all of the buildings. You don't need any password, just the network is MIT guest, just go to MIT guest, shouldn't have any problems, if you do, as people at the desks out here. As you want to tweet about the conference, maybe you already discovered, I was told that last night, the Scratch MIT 2018 was trending, so a lot of you are already tweeting about it. So we'd love for you to share things you're learning, photos you take, please share things we'd all like to see it as a community to have a record of the conference. So please tweet from there and to finally just like to thank all of this, none of this would be possible without many generous people who've been supporting the Scratch Project in general. In particular, for the conference, we've had a lot of great sponsors who are supporting the work here. So I want to thank all of them. So with that, I'll also mention, in between all the sessions, we've tried to leave a good amount of time for breaks, because we do know a big part of what people get out of conferences is just interacting with one another. So there's like half hour breaks between all the sessions, so we'll move now to a half hour break, there'll be snacks outside, think about what sessions you want, there's sessions, you shouldn't have the tickets for your morning workshops, and that will start in roughly half an hour at 11 o'clock. So again, welcome everybody to Scratch 2018. We really look forward to working together for the next few days.