Nothing beats watching the inventor of an application use their own application! Very cool to watch the inventor of Scratch, Mitch Resnick, create a Scratch project. And I learned 2 new things about Scratch watching his 7 minute demonstration: One -- that you can use the "sound" editor to edit how long a sound plays. You do this by clicking on the sound tab for a sprite. You'll see the sound wavelength in the sound editor. Click within the wavelength and you'll get a thin blue line top to bottom. Then, hold down the left mouse key and drag to wherever you want to shorten the sound. Then, go to the "edit" drop down just under the wavelength (next to "effects"). You'll see "delete" and once you click on that, you'll see the section of the wavelength you just hightlighted disappears! Meaning, you just cut out a part of the sound. You'll also see "undo" is an "edit" option, so don't worry if you don't get it right the first time; just play around with (or as MIT Media Lab likes to say, "tinker with it") until you get the sound just the way you want it.

And Second -- that a lot of the backdrop options in the Scratch library are scenes from around the MIT campus!

The added bonus is that my assignment for the Learning Creative Learning class this week was to create a Scratch project for Professor Resnick's review. Wow; another really cool opportunity to have THE expert give you feedback. Check out my submission here.