OctoStudio Geek Out!

We had a wonderful Girls Geek Day 9Dec sponsored by UVa's Tech-Girls initiative and put MIT Media Lab's new OctoStudio to the test! 10 K-5 girls created projects in our 45 minute sessions and it was impressive how intuitive and engaging they found the platform. I also located an online OctoStudio manual, but mostly, there's more tips and tricks to discover by just clicking around ;)

I'm in the process of creating an OctoStudio lesson plan series for Computers 4 Kids (C4K) so in my early drafts, please see below for some early FAQ to get started:

I would suggest going directly to "Explore" for new learners. You'll see 7 sample projects to get started. Tip: 

If you click on "Try", a project will open and when you exit after making changes (which the platform saves for you automatically as you go along unless you "undo"), it will ask "do you want to save"? I would suggest at the outset, creating a copy from the Explore home page first, by going to the far right next to the sample project, click on the “...” and click on the double square icon (2nd from the left). This way you have a clean copy and this preserves the original project template - otherwise, you risk overwriting the sample if you click on "ok" to "do you want to save?".

As I find when I teach Scratch, kids really gravitate to the OctoStudio graphics editor to create their own sprites (characters) and backdrops (stage). And what a nice editor it is! With the added bonus in OctoStudio, that you can take a photo directly on the device you've downloaded OctoStudio, and the image automatically appears in the graphics editor and with a simple touch of your finger, you can trace around the image that snaps precisely around the object you want to turn into a sprite.

A couple of things to watch for:

If you have OctoStudio open for more than an hour, sometimes it will crash, meaning the editor screen locks up and you can't do anything. What we found is that if you exit the entire platform and restart, this resolved this issue.

The MIT Media Lab is still working on Android compatibility with their release, so sounds may not play, but "speak" blocks, which have a call to a nice text to speech API does work very nicely and was suggested by the MIT Med Lab advisor I contacted via Facebook (Programming in Scratch - Teacher Group)

Also I find the user interface (UX) vastly different using my phone vs using a tablet. More objects are visible and easy to access using a tablet (specifically i-pad) so I would strongly suggest using that approach for the most positive early experience playing around in OctoStudio.

Stay tuned as I release my OctoStudio lesson plans in Jan 2024 for middle schooler use, where I'm sure we'll uncover more scripting gems to share!