Be a helper; the best way to learn is to teach.

This week, an MIT Media lab Scratch researcher, Champika Fernando, gave this really interesting talk about the work they're doing to improve the Scratch 2.0 discussion part of the online community. Check it out here. In a nutshell, they've found the Scratch community is full of really great "help" authors and projects, but that it's tough to really know if those who need help are able to connect with "helpers". Champika and her team want to make the "Discussion Forum" more dynamic by:

**Allowing you, within your project where you have a question, to better summarize the question(s) directly, like somewhere in the title page (where Scratch takes you when you click on the link of your project that gives you the view where you add "Instructions" and "Notes and Comments"). If the MIT Media Lab added some sort of standard "drop down" selection broadly classifying the type of question you had ("Motion", "Variable", "Sound", "other"), Scratch could build reports that summarize in real time "help" needs and moderators could more easily pick projects to "help".

**Embedding your questions directly within your project allows moderators to answer directly using your code, instead of trying to respond to an abstract description of what you're trying to do. I handle teaching my classes this way, directing kids to share projects to the class "studio" we can't resolve during class time, adding comments, so I can review and debug directly within their code. And, the backpack feature really helps, too, allowing you to share bits of code recipes ("snippets") from one project to the next. For example, during class time, if a kid had a cool block of code that might help another kid with their own project, have the code author share their project to the class studio with the code block needed dragged over and saved to the "backpack". And have the kid needing help remix this project, where the code block will now be available within the backpack for them to add to their own project(s)!

**It would be great too, if there was some sort of way that when someone other than the author adds to existing code, Scratch identifies this so the author can see it and "accept" or "reject"  the help offered.

**Coming up with some sort of system to identify Scratch "subject matter experts" (SME) to ensure that within the incredible helping spirit from Scratch users, certain identified experts get involved to make sure answers provided truly meet the helping need!

I know for this upcoming Summer Enrichment series I'm teaching, I'm going to put extra emphasis on what it means to "remix" a project and how the new Scratch 2.0 environment lets you share code project to project using the backpack tool. This is a hugely transferable skill, one we use in the professional programming community, building code using standard logic blocks, to develop and maintain projects efficiently and accurately within a team.