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Scratch: Margaret Honey on the Platform That Makes Kids Feel Like Superheroes

Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell Season 10

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Dr. Margaret Honey joined the Scratch Foundation as the organization’s President & CEO in January 2024. She is widely recognized for her work using digital technologies to support children’s learning and brings decades of non-profit leadership experience and expertise to the Scratch Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation, Dr. Honey led the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) for 15 years, where she leveraged the museum as a platform for innovation in STEM education and developed NYSCI’s distinctive Design-Make-Play approach to STEM learning. A graduate of Hampshire College with a doctorate in developmental psychology from Columbia University, Margaret Honey has helped to shape the best thinking about learning and technology with special attention to ensuring that all young people have access to high-quality creative learning opportunities.

💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:

  1. How Scratch empowers children through creativity, coding, and community.
  2. The history and growth of Scratch into a global platform with over 46 million users.
  3. The unique philosophy of learning that sets Scratch apart from traditional edtech tools.
  4. How Scratch is approaching AI integration to foster exploration and child agency.
  5. Why sustainable, mission-driven models are essential for educational platforms.

✨ Episode Highlights:

[00:02:27] “There’s no learning without inspiration.”
[00:03:59] Scratch hits 46 million users and 21.5 million new sign-ups in 2024.
[00:06:51] Scratch empowers kids with agency and creative coding.
[00:07:47] Global education shifts toward creativity and problem-solving.
[00:13:50] 35 million studios show Scratch’s thriving peer-to-peer community.
[00:18:29] “It would be impossible to do now what Scratch did then.”
[00:24:34] Scratch explores AI as a tool for creativity, not instruction.
[00:32:29] A museum exhibit inspires a child: “I have superpowers.”
[00:34:15] Rethinking education to match the pace of technological change.

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[00:00:00] Margaret Honey: This might be a bit controversial to say, but I think. With the emphasis on testing and accountability, there's just been a way in which so much of that has usurped the possibility for teachers to really bring and execute on strategies that are more centered in young people's curiosities that really.

Ignite them, motivate them, interest them.

[00:00:32] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech 

[00:00:46] Ben Kornell: Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod. Check out our newsletter and also our event calendar.

And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.

[00:01:11] Alex Sarlin: Dr. Margaret Honey joined the Scratch Foundation as the organization's president and CEO in January, 2024. She is widely recognized for her work using digital technologies to support children's learning and brings decades of nonprofit leadership experience and expertise to the Scratch foundation. Prior to joining the foundation, Dr.

Honey led the New York Hall of Science N-Y-S-C-I for 15 years, where she leveraged the museum as a platform for innovation in STEM education. And developed NYS C's. Distinctive design, make play approach to STEM learning. A graduate of Hampshire College with a doctorate in developmental psychology from Columbia University.

Margaret Honey has helped to shape the best thinking about learning and technology with special attention to ensuring that all young people have access to high quality creative learning opportunities. Margaret Honey, welcome to EdTech Insiders. 

[00:02:05] Margaret Honey: It's great to be with you, Alex. 

[00:02:07] Alex Sarlin: It's really great to have you here.

I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So you were the head of the New York Hall of Science for 15 years, and now you are at the Scratch Foundation. Tell us a little bit about your approach to education and how you've had, sort of had this through line of creative learning. 

[00:02:27] Margaret Honey: Yeah, that's right.

And what I like to say is there's no learning without. Inspiration. I think without motivation and passion, not just on the part of young people, but on the part of educators, the adults who are working with young people as well. I feel strongly that that kind of deep, meaningful, inspirational. Connection is what makes the, call it the teaching relationship.

Call it a mentoring relationship, but it's what makes it memorable. It's what opens up possibilities for young people to learn in ways they didn't anticipate learning, and it's incredibly enriching for the adults who work with them as well. 

[00:03:11] Ben Kornell: So in terms of scratch, can you just tell us a little bit about the evolution of Scratch and as you're looking forward and thinking about the future of coding, future of ai, how do you think Scratch is going to evolve?

[00:03:25] Margaret Honey: Yeah. Great questions, Ben. Thank you. So Scratch was created by Mitch Resnick at the Media Lab as part of his lifelong kindergarten group. It debuted in 2007. Scratch has been around for a while, but the extraordinary thing is that it continues to grow and be used by millions of young people. Around the world.

So just to give you a little flavor of that, in 2024, we saw 21 and a half million new users on the platform. 46 million active users. 

[00:03:59] Alex Sarlin: Wow. 

[00:04:00] Margaret Honey: Every country in the world. And I've known and respected Mitch for many years before joining as the leader of the foundation, I was on the board and I think what Mitch did.

That is really the kind of secret sauce of scratch is that in designing, what scratch is he centered children's agency, their passions, their ideas, what they wanna commit to. And when you think about that. In the landscape of ed tech, it's a real differentiator because so much of what Ed Tech has worked on over its 40 year history is approaches to learning that are about sort of delivering the learner what it needs at the right moment in time.

Opportunities to practice the kinds of skills that the tech is trying to help kids develop. Scratch takes a very different. Approach. And a lot of people associate scratch as a coding platform. Kids do learn to code using Scratch. But again, what Mitch set out to do was not create a program that would teach kids coding, but to create a simplified visual, very compelling and playful.

Interface to coding so that young people could use it as a tool for creative expression. And they do. There are over a billion scratch projects that have been created on the platform. 

[00:05:35] Ben Kornell: We've got several hundred in my household. My son Sebastian, is an avid scratch user, and we've got scratch. Animal dance parties galore going on in my house.

[00:05:46] Margaret Honey: You know exactly what I'm saying. And one other thing, 'cause I love these stories that come my way. So May 15th is Scratch's birthday and we celebrate with children around the world and they send messages and there's one that, I mean there are many, but there's one I'd love to share with you guys 'cause it's so compelling.

So. This young scratcher says, happy Birthday, scratch. You're more than just a website, your universe of possibilities. From simple animations to complex games, you've been the catalyst for countless aha moments. Here's to use Scratch the Canvas where creativity meets logic. Where bugs become features and when every line of code whispers you can do this.

Wow. I love it because it's like your family dance parties around scratch. It's the equivalent of that. It creates an environment in which kids have voice and agency and they really have an opportunity to bring their ideas to life, and I think that's just essential. 

[00:06:51] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Your point about EdTech often being a little bit more about content delivery and assessment and something like Scratch being much more of a sort of playground sandbox toolkit, you can use any metaphor you'd like Lego set almost where you can sort of make anything you'd like come alive.

It's really making me think because coding, as you mentioned, scratch is a coding platform. It's not. Purely just like learn to code. It's have fun while coding make all sorts of amazing things, and you'll learn a lot along the way. There's often not much room for that type of learning in the traditional school environment, which is why things like Scratch or Minecraft or other creative toolkit tools tend to take off outside of school time.

Do you see that? Changing. Do you think that there's any opportunity to make more space in the school day for a student agency for creative projects like what you've done at scratch? 

[00:07:47] Margaret Honey: So I think there's more of that going on than we realize. Hmm. Both here in the US and certainly around the world. And I say around the world because Pisa, the program and International Student Assessment has been driving an approach to the assessment of 15 year olds, which they've been working on now for what, 30 years or so, which.

Is anchored in sort of skills that have much more to do with curiosity and creativity and problem solving than simply getting to the right. Answer, and they're debuting an assessment this year called Learning in the Digital World, and it really has two fundamental goals associated with it. Can kids use technologies to problem solve, to work their way through a problem and figure out how to solve it?

That's one. And the second is, can they use technology to represent and express what they know? Hmm. And I learned the other day that 86 countries have signed up for the assessment. This year, we're seeing it in our data. Our data will flag outliers. In November, Saudi Arabia went from 6,000 users a month to 40.

That can only be driven by a ministry of education, you know, here in the states. I've been around long enough to remember this, but we've long had creative learning paradigms that operate within our schools. So if you go back now several decades to the work, Ted Sizer did with a very broad and inclusive network of schools called the Coalition of Essential Schools.

And you look at some of the. Children or sort of new schools that network fostered big picture learning is in there, high tech, high in there, expeditiary learning. These were all people who were proteges of Teds that learned from that vast and enormous network. So it's not that we don't have it, we do, it's just by no means everywhere.

And I think I. This might be a bit controversial to say, but I think. With the emphasis on testing and accountability, there's just been a way in which so much of that has usurped the possibility for teachers to really bring and execute on strategies that are more centered in young people's curiosities, that really ignite them, motivate them, interest them.

I think it's one of the. As we continue to contend, post pandemic with student absenteeism in some way, the pandemic was a little bit of dress rehearsal for voting with your feet. I think we're continuing to see that. My experience at the New York Hall of Science taught me a lot about what learning looks like when it's not driven by compliance.

Right. And we often used to say, our audiences vote with their feet. So the experiences that we designed and developed had to have a real kind of stickiness and engagement quality to them. We really had to think about the things that young people were curious about, and I think. That kind of work, of course, within the parameters that guide the curriculum, but that is the kind of work that goes on in what I would call our creative learning schools, or what Jean Claude Digital Promise calls powerful learning, right?

Mm-hmm. That network of schools where educators are really. Wrestling to the ground, how they motivate, how they inspire, and how they do that in a way that builds. Legitimate deep and meaningful competencies that young people need for the world they're inheriting. 

[00:11:54] Ben Kornell: I think that concept has been around for a long time.

In the seventies, there was a lot of really good work done around learning through play and experiential learning, and also understanding intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and where that goes. And I think a big challenge has been how do we enable it and how do we measure it? How do we. Quantify it, and now we're entering this new age where there's actually lots of ways that you can measure and calibrate and quantify it.

I think one of the keys though, that scratch has unlocked is not just the solo player mode. Of scratch, but the multiplayer or like universe, there's something around peer-to-peer inspiration that Scratch has tapped into. And I can see it with my own son. Looking at how somebody else built something and leveraging that to inspire you to build your own thing is powerfully motivating.

And I think the kind of degree to which we as educators, I, myself, middle school teachers are trying to control. The class and drive things on a single train track to the destination. There's something foundationally open and free and social and collaborative about scratch that has created this resonance.

And those of you who've been on the platform before, this is not the like most modern advanced skin UI interaction, but there's something just so authentic about it that people are drawn in, they keep coming back. And then of course. As a parent, when I'm sitting with my child, I'm making stuff too. And so there's a way in which this came out of a lifelong play initiative, so I'd just be curious to talk about how important is that multiplayer element?

How important is that social component, and how should we as people who care about education, think about that? 

[00:13:50] Margaret Honey: Yeah. The Scratch global community is another piece of niche's, brilliance, right? The idea that kids can learn from each other, they can borrow one another's code, they can be inspired by one another is.

So central to how scratch works and what makes it meaningful to kids. So we established in 24 a global youth advisory board. So we have 55 young people representing about 15 countries around the world. I think they range in age from nine to 17. And not surprisingly, they're the kids who raise their hands and submitted.

Fabulous projects to get invited into this experience. So they're kind of the movers and shakers, but each and every one of them references the importance of the online community and the importance of learning from one another. So it's a big deal, and to give you a little bit of a feel for how it has grown and evolved.

So one of the mechanisms. Through which kids can share ideas is called the studios. So kids can start studios on any topic that they want, and these days there are 35 million studios within the scratch community. 

[00:15:08] Alex Sarlin: Wow. 

[00:15:08] Margaret Honey: Creating other interesting challenges for us, there are over 200 million shared projects.

So of those billion projects that I referenced, about a quarter of them, a little bit less have been about a fifth of them have been shared publicly. In the online community, not everybody does it, but for kids who do it, we know it's incredibly important. And one thing I was thinking about is Mimi Ito, who runs the Connected Learning Lab at uc, Irvine, she's really worked on designing and researching like what productive online spaces.

Can look like for young people for her entire career, right? And she came to talk to us at scratch and she said that three things that have been sort of in my brain ever since because I think they're so important. And she said, first culture, particularly online culture. It's hard to establish, but once established.

It's hard to dislodge, scratch, embodies that the kids are very clear and definitive about what it means to them and why it's important. She also said that social places for kids online are rare and precious. Mm-hmm. And new ones are impossible. And then the third thing she said that really got me thinking is she said it would be impossible.

To do now, what Scratch did when Mitch first launched the community? And I thought about that, and I haven't circled back with Mimi to talk about this, but as I thought about that, I think we've become so used to the ways in which, I'm just gonna call it traditional social media operates feeding you more of what you like.

Right. One of my colleagues was telling me a story about a niece that was visiting, and she said, I love TikTok because it knows exactly what I want. Right. And that is a very seductive power that social media leverages and brings into the equation. But I think what underlies that is, of course, a commercial model that makes it possible to sustain and profit off of these environments.

And it's really hard. For people, I think, to imagine how you could build something different that isn't premised on that kind of model. So scratch is distinctive in that way, and part of our future is figuring out. In ways that are very mission aligned, how we don't just rely on philanthropic sources of revenue, but we can have repeatable sources of earned revenue with the goal of continuing to keep the platform free for kids around the world.

So it creates amazing opportunities for kids and also really. Interesting challenges around how do we continue to do this kind of really important good work for young people at scale and in a way that keeps it free for everyone, because that's a non-negotiable as it should be for Mitch as our founder.

So. 

[00:18:29] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's interesting to hear you compare sort of the, as you say, traditional social media paradigms, which especially now are sort of at a real ebb with Jonathan Height's, work with Congress for lots of reasons, lots of good reasons. I think there's a feeling that social media has been really a negative force for young people.

There's lots of evidence for it, but then you look at positive sharing, uplifting, creative communities like what Scratch is, and there are some others out there. They're few and far between. When you say that Mimi Ito says Scratch couldn't be created today, I'm curious. We have a lot of founders and entrepreneurs who listen to the podcast, some of whom, who are thinking about creative community, about multiplayer modes, about trying to get user generated content and have students sharing things with each other.

I, I've seen a number of startups that feature that. And I'd love, just pick your brain a little bit about is it that it can't happen today because of the negative connotations with social media and with kids online behavior? How might we overcome that and create new creative communities? 

[00:19:34] Margaret Honey: Yeah. I don't know exactly what Mimi meant by that, but where my brain went is, and you've probably, you may have answers from some of the founders who you've been talking to, but.

How do you build an economic model that will work? So, you know, Roblox is spending 30 to 40% of their revenue goes to trying to keep their online community safe, which is a stunning amount of money. 

[00:20:06] Ben Kornell: Yeah, right. Yeah. Especially for the effectiveness. 

[00:20:08] Margaret Honey: Yeah, exactly. So I think some of the considerations that are in the mix are those, and we'll see how effective we are in creating sustainable sources of revenue that can nurture and feed scratch over time.

Frankly, I think in some respects it's easier to do as a nonprofit. Than it is mm-hmm. As a commercial entity, because we're not trying to garner a return for our investors, right? Mm-hmm. This, it really is a philanthropic play. 

[00:20:41] Ben Kornell: Yeah. All of your kind of profit is really reinvested in the mission and the work.

Yeah. And I think what we're also seeing is that. There are state level mandates around computer science, education and so on, that there's not real pedagogical support to deliver on those things. That might be the teachers are not trained. It might be that there's not the right curriculum. Yeah. And we're also seeing the need or opportunity for younger and younger learners getting exposure to code.

And I think scratch has been, you know, tip of the spear. On all of this, you've gotten this organic growth bottoms up. But I think now, you know, having been on school board myself, there's an opportunity for schools and school systems to think more strategically and have like professional development contracts with y'all or with organizations affiliated with scratch so that I can be accessible to all and done in a way that is leveling kids and their abilities up.

[00:21:41] Margaret Honey: I also think one of the tremendous opportunities that is in front of all of us is, you know, how we begin to think about AI and for scratch. That's, you know, it's really a question of how do we think of AI as a tool for creative learning purposes, and how do we do that in a way that is safe for our population of users and can be scaled.

In ways that are cost effective, and we've been doing a lot of really interesting work in this area, and I think our differentiators are, one, our data. Which makes it possible for us to build, I might call it a much smaller domain specific kind of LLM that is gated in a way, and can ensure that the information that children have access to is quality information, right.

We don't have to worry about them wandering out into LLMs all over the internet. It also, it provides safety, but it also provides for cost efficiencies that are really making, uh, that are really important to making. I. What we're doing available at scale. And then the second area I think is, you know, it is our pedagogy.

It is like, because we center children, because we want them to be creative, we want them to make decisions. We want the agency to be theirs. We don't want to tell them, this is what you need to do to learn.

We're continuing to behave like scratch. We're, and we're behaving very differently from a lot of platforms that are out there and are thinking about ways in which to use AI as kind of a just in time tutor or, you know, sort of resource that's going to deliver to you what you need to know so you can do x.

And hopefully learn it. And our approach is very different. It's less about bringing, you know, efficiencies to young people's learning. It's more. That we wanna foster among young people, exploration and creativity. So the data that we are drawing upon is a really rich repository of all of the different ways, strategies and practices that kids have used to build and make and create and scratch.

And there's not a right way. Or a wrong way. There's a myriad of opportunities. And so what we are exploring is a kind of personalized AI assistant that doesn't tell you what to do in the moment, but that offers up options and suggestions. 

[00:24:34] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm. 

[00:24:35] Margaret Honey: And choices yours for what you wanna draw upon and act upon.

Right. And I think a lot about how do I use AI in my own work? Right. And it's. Coach or guide or suggester or idea generator or you know, a stimulant or, or a catalyst, it's, I don't ever go to AI to get an answer. Right. So, you know, what we're trying to do in scratch I think is really figure out. The creative learning paradigm for taking this next generation of technology and using it in an analogous way to how Mitch leveraged coding as a platform for creative expression.

We now really wanna. Figure out the right ways and strategies for leveraging AI as a next generation platform for creative. 

[00:25:30] Alex Sarlin: It's such an interesting challenge. You know, I think there's two things that jump to mind for me that are related to this, which is one is that idea of safety, of creating a safe.

Community with norms and rules and actual safety, actual protocols and protections is definitely one big part of creating a, a meaningful community for kids. But the other side of it is that beginner's mind, that idea of bringing people together in a spirit of. Exploration and creativity and curiosity as you mentioned, and not trying to challenge one another or judge one another's work.

And you know, the places where I've actually seen that recently, and it, I think it's relevant to what you're saying, are the mid journey creation engine is built on top of the Discord platform. So you have these. Places where people are coming into this new technology that can literally do anything you ask it to do.

But there are all these hidden capabilities. You could ask it to use a particular camera lens and it'll simulate that. You can ask it to do different styles of art, and you have this really rich community of people sharing, saying. Look what I made and here's how I made it. I had to use this comp and I told it to do this kind of thing, and I changed the ratio.

And then somebody else goes, oh, I just tried that same thing on mine and look at what happened. And it feels like it has a little touch of that sort of scratch like community aspect of a supportive, engaging community. And I think part of why is that AI is so new that everybody really is a beginner, right?

People are not. Out to out shine each other. They're out to be like, look how amazing it is that we can do something at all. And I think you have some of that in scratch as well. You as people come in and then they get better and better using the platform. I'm curious if that resonates with you and if there's something that you, you know, just like how might you scale that kind of community?

Yeah. I'm just curious what it brings up for you. 

[00:27:15] Margaret Honey: Yeah. So it resonates very deeply with me because I think what you're pointing to Alex in those examples is really a consideration of how do we use these new tools and opportunities that are being brought to the table through the prevalence of AI in different disciplines, in different areas?

How do we use them in ways to accelerate and supercharge our own inherent creative? Aspirations or ideas, and I think it's such an important thing to do because if you think about it, and it was a guy named Richard Puri, who is the chief scientist at IBM Research and a brilliant guy, very familiar with Scratch, and I talked to him a year or so ago, and he kind of put a provocation in front of me.

He said, Margaret, what Mitch did for coding you should now do for ai. 

[00:28:10] Alex Sarlin: I agree. 

[00:28:11] Margaret Honey: I had no idea. Had to think about that at first, but I think what you just said, the description you just gave of people coming together to use creative tools to share ideas, to focus on the ways in which I. Technology can enhance their own creative superpowers is in fact exactly what Rooter was talking about.

And that's our aspiration. That's what we're trying to do. So, you know, it's a, it's a big, bold, ambitious challenge because we have to do it safely. We have to do it in a way that can engage tens of millions of users around the world every year. And we have to do it in a way that is. Really intentional and deliberate about centering kids' curiosities, their imaginations, their ideas, right?

Yeah. So it has to be a platform that continues to empower and enhance, and I think, I like the words supercharge because I think the magic of children is that they are so inherently creative somehow over time. We reduce those wonderfully important human attributes in favor of others, and I think there's a reason why, um, Mitch Resnick named his lab lifelong Kindergarten.

[00:29:37] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm. 

[00:29:38] Margaret Honey: Like that's the spirit that underlies creative learning. And I think as AI rolls into our lives and takes over many, many more of the cognitive functions that we used to do, creativity is going to be the essential. Ingredient of the future. 

[00:29:59] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's such an interesting way to look at it and I totally agree.

And I think some of the things scratch did with the block-based coding and shareable code snippets. There are some elements in there that I think could report very well to an AI world 'cause they keep this wild. You can do a million things, but you can't do a billion things, right? Like there's still constraints, which is important for children because you don't want it to be completely unconstrained.

It get very strange very quickly. But then you can borrow pieces of what other people are doing in AI that might be borrowing prompts or borrowing little pieces of instructions or elements of a custom bot. I would love to see Scratch do that, and I think it could be, I can't think of a better shepherd of that.

[00:30:39] Margaret Honey: One last story from the Hall of Science, 'cause you brought that up at the beginning. And we created this debuted, now it's 10 years ago, but in 2015 we debuted an exhibit called Connected Worlds. And at the time it was the largest interactive, digitally immersive experience in the world. We did it in partnership with a wonderful firm called Design io.

Emily, uh, Theo, uh, Watson and Emily Go, Beal. Are the two principles there. And they're brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Both technologists and designers and in connected worlds you have, you have biomes, different habitats, a rainforest, a desert, things like that. And you have a giant projected waterfall that with water that flows across the space and to enrich and get the biomes to come to life and grow, you have to, you have to move water into them.

And you interact with the biomes by holding out your hand and you create seeds that will drop. And if there's enough moisture in the ground, they'll blossom. And as they blossom, plants and habitats grow and creatures come into the environment. And it's truly, it's truly stunning. And it's all about centering kids' agency and playfulness.

And when we were prototyping, it was one little boy. The team caught him on camera looking at the camera saying, this exhibit makes me feel like I have superpowers. 

[00:32:09] Alex Sarlin: And 

[00:32:10] Margaret Honey: what I love about that is what Scratch does for kids. And I think it's what we wanna keep doing as we, you know, introduce this next generation of extraordinary technologies to young people around the globe.

So it's really, it's a very exciting time for us. 

[00:32:29] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And it's an amazing moment for young people. I think. You know, scratch lowered the barrier to entry, to coding, to computational thinking. They often call it. Right? But now the barrier to entry to creating whole mobile apps or creating beautiful works of art or songs or games is coming down, or incredible photographs or immersive worlds like.

The amount of things that that young people can now, even now, let alone a year from now create just with their ideas and some tooling. It's never been possible before. It's like it could be a creative revolution, but yes, we need to really create some systems and communities and supports to allow that to happen.

[00:33:07] Margaret Honey: I think we need to rethink the fundamentals of the nature of learning that we're designing for, because that's really what's at stake here. If we're designing for a system that is so out of step with where. The rest of the world is we're, we're going to continue to do a disservice to our young people.

And you know, I think the lessons that can be learned from scratch in that regard are, are multiple and many because if you design for ways that are explicitly intended to empower young people to really. Enable them to be passionate and invested in their own learning, being interested, and willing to problem solve.

[00:33:56] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. 

[00:33:57] Margaret Honey: Then you're in a completely different kind of space, which I believe is where we need to be. Particularly in a world where, you know, as I said, AI is going to do increasingly more and more of the cognitive work that we used to do as people. 

[00:34:15] Alex Sarlin: I'm really excited to see what is next for, for Scratch Foundation for the scratch tooling.

And I think that challenge of, can you do for ai, what, what Scratch did for coding, you know, make it accessible, collaborative, global, you know, global community. It's like I. Fantastic North Star for this moment, so this has been fantastic. There. Any final thoughts you'd like to leave us with? We, we also always ask, you know, where can people find out more about what the Scratch Foundation is doing?

Where should they go online? Or is there a resource that you would recommend for people to Yeah. Dive into? 

[00:34:45] Margaret Honey: I mean, they can, you know, scratch foundation.org is our website. We're of course. Overhauling it a work in progress, but we'll get there and you know, the editor is scratch mit edu. That's where everybody goes to Make With Scratch and there's lots on our website.

And of course there's lots to learn if you pick up and start creating in the scratch platform. 

[00:35:10] Alex Sarlin: It's a really fantastic paradigm, I think, for how education could and should look in a era where creativity is just unbounded. It always technically is, but people don't always see it that way. I think your examples of big picture learning, high tech, high, you know how certain there are these certain pockets of student first, you know, agency based learning, but.

To get that to happen broadly, either in school or out of school, is takes a lot of work. Thank you so much. This is Margaret Honey, president and CEO of the Scratch Foundation, formerly 15 years of New York Hall of Science. Thank you so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders. 

[00:35:45] Margaret Honey: Thank you, Alex. A real pleasure.

[00:35:48] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to. The Free EdTech Insiders Newsletter on Substack.

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