We're off and running, putting Scratch 2.0 to the test, me and my fellow 34 animators with the Saturday UVa Enrichment Program! The new "Studio" feature is extremely helpful, allowing me to share Scratch project templates and links to other resources with everyone in the class. To use it, create a Studio associated to your account and check "allow anyone to add projects". Once created, at the top, you'll see 4 tabs (Projects, Comments, Curators, Activity); Scratch 2.0 calls all that participate in a Studio "Curators". Click on the "Curators" tab, and at the top, you'll see a button "Invite Curators". When you click on this, you'll get an "Add" text box, where you type in the username of the fellow Scratch 2.0 user you want to be able to see and add to your "Studio". When you invite someone, they will receive a notification in their Scratch 2.0 "inbox" (click on the mailbox icon at the top of your account). The notification has a link you can click on to "accept", which once accepted, will add the inviter's studio to the invitee's account. Now, when the invitee "shares" a project, the Studio name will show up as a "share to" destination and if selected, allows the invitee to add to the Studio so the inviter and other invitees can see their work, a very convenient way to review class work and share feedback.

As for the new platform's performance, we did notice some glitches, where sometimes Scratch doesn't immediately recognize what you program, so it acts like your script is not working, when, really, there's some delay in what you added traveling to and from the Scratch server (we call this "Posting"). I found that programming that didn't work during class time (we were working 1p Eastern Time on a Saturday, likely a very heavy traffic period for the Scratch servers), did work when I ran the program later that evening. A little tricky for kids trying to learn how to program in Scratch, when they don't get immediate feedback from the system to know if what they programmed worked. Another issue, is that sometimes, sprites added just "disappear", even from the bottom of the player view -- you see a sprite name, but the sprite icon is blank and nothing displays within the player? I'm going to research this "Phantom" sprite behavior. I suspect adding multiple project files to an account within a short span might cause this? While the new 2.0 auto-save feature is helpful (Scratch immediately saves a file to your "my stuff" folder when you click "create"), new users sometime lose track of this, and I did find several kids had 10+ untitled empty Scratch files in their "My Stuff" folder that I'm pretty sure they didn't mean to create. But, all in all, a very fun start!