Toward Finland’s Educational Model

Finnish model: combining public education with autonomous schools & teachers.

Scratch: Learning by Remixing

I came across an interesting Medium post about the visual programming language and framework Scratch. The post said that some 30% of pupil projects in Scratch are remixes. In other words, three in ten projects build on top of existing ones.

There’s nothing surprising here. First of all, reusing and -mixing existing projects is made easy in Scratch. Secondly, building on top of existing code is an age-old tradition and a common way of working in the programming community. The rest of the world has a lot to learn from developers on how to avoid reinventing the wheel.

What’s interesting, instead, is that remixing actually teaches new concepts. The writers of the above-mentioned Medium post had done research on Scratch community and found out that kids started to use concepts they had never used before but were exposed through remixing.

What to make of this? To me it means that remixing and reusing is not brainless copying & pasting. No, it is an active process of taking existing material, investigating it, enriching with own additions, and releasing for others to remix even further. Standing on the shoulders of giants, paying forward, adding value, etc. There are many ways to describe this process.

How about expanding this beyond programming projects? Are there “traditional” school subjects or activities where remix culture would fit? I am thinking for example written essays. Remixing essays could create an interesting Wikipedia-like network of written content.

This is against the grain; plagiarism is a known problem in this day and age, when stealing answers from the web is ever so easy. Dealing with this comes down to assessment. In addition to the essay, maybe the student could at least be assessed with additional questions to verify how well she understands the core topics in her essay. If she could answer to such questions, then it wouldn’t matter if she had used someone else’s content in her writing. Because she had learned, right?