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We’ve long been making bots with hardware, now we’re making them with software too! They started as simple one-off “report bots.” Basically, helpful commands that anyone in our Slack could use to show useful information like who’s out on a given day, or how much vacation time we’ve taken. We also made a bot where […]

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Announcing Chatter: a library for making interactive chat bots on slack and more

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• bots,
• chatter

Were you around for June 19, 2000? It was a great day! There we were, the human race, collectively: just kicking off the summer, waiting in line for Gone in 60 Seconds, digging in to our McSalad Shakers, yet greedily wondering who could take us still higher. Even Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) was living its best […]

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The Web’s Most Tolerated Feature

So geographers, in Afric maps With savage pictures fill their gaps And o’er uninhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns This snippet from 18th century writer John Swift’s epic poem “Poetry: A Rhapsody” demonstrates that for centuries we have grappled with the politics of drawing borders, naming places, and mapping. There is no such […]

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No Neutral Map

Each year, on the third Thursday of May, millions across the globe come together to acknowledge and celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), an initiative started by Joe Devon and Jennison Asuncion. Devon and Asuncion created the day with the intention for people to gather and “learn about and experience digital accessibility.” Back in November […]

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Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day! Resources for Getting Started with Digital Accessibility

One of the best parts of the Scratch community is the diversity of Scratch projects. Community members have used the Scratch programming language to create many different kinds of interactive applications, from full game engines to music sequencers. One genre is especially unique: Multiple Animator Projects, or MAPs. These Scratch projects compile animations from many […]

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Experiments in Faster Scratch 3 Loading with Texture Atlases

Earlier this year, we shared our work on the launch of Scratch 3.0, a major version of the visual programming environment for children of all ages. The new version of Scratch marked a complete rewrite of the runtime in JavaScript leveraging open web APIs. In our previous post, we enumerated the many performance optimizations that […]

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Optimizing Scratch 3 Pen Blocks

Today, we are excited to announce our partnership with JoyLabz, which began in 2017 and has centered around the development of a new game console called GameBender. JoyLabz, developers of Makey Makey and Drawdio, and founded by former Lifelong Kindergarten researcher Jay Silver, has been an incredible partner. We are excited to finally share the […]

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Glitching Scratch 3.0 on an Embedded Web Game Console

Last year we formed a team focused on using the growing number of new web APIs to build multimedia applications that push the edge of the web platform. Our main work in this area over the last 2 years has been with the wonderful team behind Scratch at MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group (LLK), and with […]

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Porting Scratch from Flash to JavaScript: Performance, Interoperability and Extensions

I’m excited to share that our technical partnerships team has developed a deeper focus on graphics and interactive application programming, a focus area which we are affectionately calling Gaia. As of today, Technical Partnerships is now Graphics and Interactive Applications (Gaia for short). In many ways this is a reflection of what this team has […]

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Introducing Gaia

Peter Beshai has hung up his Bocoup jersey so that he can continue to challenge himself in the field of data visualization. We wanted to take a moment to talk about why Peter will always be a member of this team, wherever he plays Peter’s first order of business was creating an interactive experience for […]

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Peter Changes Divisions