Mitch Resnick and Karen Brennan from MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten stopped by Srishti yesterday to talk about the Scratch programming language and other goodies.

Mitch wondered whether there was an application for Scratch and the physical computing blocks the Pico Crickets. The CEMA lab has used Scratch and Crickets in the past as a way to quickly mock up projects, but never as tools themselves for the completion of work. Usually after an early prototype in Scratch and Crickets we have students move over to Processing and Arduino.

But, one of the benefits of using these two systems is that they are both intentionally designed with limited palettes. The constraints of both these tools have the potential to drive creativity precisely because their vocabulary is smaller.

Lets see what we can do with them in the next few months at the lab.

Here is a quick remix I made: