🐙📱 OctoStudio Explorations and Reflections
Tinkering with patterns and code, and thinking about creative coding pathways
We celebrated the launch of Octostudio a few months ago! ✨ 🐙 Since then, the OctoStudio community has been growing and we’ve seen so many inventive and playful experiences emerge from educators and learners around the world. If you want to stay in the loop and see what’s new in the OctoStudio world you can check out the website: octostudio.org and sign up for the OctoStudio newsletter.
OctoStudio + Patterns
In February, the Tinkering Studio and OctoStudio team facilitated a month-long “Octo Sparks” invitation to tinker with patterns and code. February was just the beginning, so it’s not too late to join in! Check out the Tinkering Studio’s page with ideas for tinkering with OctoStudio + Patterns, and watch the recorded livestream for some seriously inspiring invitations to tinker:
OctoStudio Explorations
OctoStudio + Patterns is one among a whole set of OctoStudio explorations that combine real world materials and tinkering with code. Take a look at the OctoStudio Explorations page for more ideas.
Behind the Scenes
Our Facilitating Computational Tinkering project team thinks a lot about how to create the conditions for creative learning, and we sometimes draw from our own experiences as learners and makers to inform what we design. Hear from Steph from the Tinkering Studio about how she’s thinking about her relationship to code and creativity as their team works to how to invite learners into playful coding experiences. ⬇️
”Every coding class I took as a student followed the same structure: weeks and weeks of set assignments with fixed outcomes. Then, for the final project at the very end of the course, a breath of fresh air: at long last, we’d be given the space for some creativity.
This format — of front-loading instruction to give us the tools for coding before eventually getting a creative prompt — seemed logical and fixed to me. I thought that instructional approaches to coding had to come before you got to express yourself and play, even as I noticed that my engagement waned when building towards fixed outcomes and skyrocketed when making personalized projects to share my own ideas.
On the Tinkering Studio team, and especially since the launch of OctoStudio, I’ve had the chance to interrogate this approach. Our work on the Facilitating Computational Project in conversation with collaborators at the Lifelong Kindergarten group and Creative Communities research group at CU Boulder has helped me challenge the view that you have to start step-by-step before things can get creative. Instead, we center our R&D sessions around how to support learners in using code as a tool for creative expression. We value all of the prior experiences as a person that they bring to the table – not just their experience as a coder.
With this lens, we’ve been playing with OctoStudio in the lead up to its public launch and are so excited to be able to invite everyone into these explorations! OctoStudio is a really powerful tool, especially for storytelling and creative expression. We’re still surprising ourselves with new ways to combine code and physical materials. We’ll continue building out these OctoStudio Explorations, but we hope this set of starting points is enough to spark ideas of how to creatively combine code with physical materials to support learners in expressing their ideas.”