The Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT released Scratch during my early teaching days at Lovett. I fell in love instantly and spent many happy hours designing learning experiences for my students. I also created numerous personal projects; here is a sampling of my favorites.

Face

I created this project at the Constructing Modern Knowledge 2009 workshop. It arose from a simple goal: evoke an emotional reaction in under one minute. I decided to take advantage of our tendency to recognize faces in just about anything, and designed this project.

If you watch for long enough, you’ll see all sorts of emotions and attitudes, from anxious, to happy, to bewildered, to mischievous, to blue.

The hardest part of this project was working out the limitations for the motion of the larger white oval that creates the mouth shapes. I didn’t want it to wander too far away, nor did I want it to completely cover the black oval. After several hours recalling my high school trig, I had a solution.

Maze

You control a robot named "O" using the arrow keys. The object is to find the gold star and put it in the star-shaped hole (which you see next to you when you start). You'll need to pick up keys which open specific doors that unlock parts of the maze. Remember that you can only carry one key at a time.

This games uses a simple engine I developed to scroll across a set of background sprites that make up a map.

Phizdot

This is a game concept. You control the plus-shaped thing using the arrow keys. The paisley roams the screen, dropping little gems that you have to pick up (in the correct order!) while avoiding the baddies.