In Spring 2020, the Pandemic had hit and everyone was locked away working, studying and playing remotely.
I was taking a class with Mitch Resnick at the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at MIT Media Lab. This also the home of the Scratch programming language. Though collaborative working/creating was possible in an asynchronous way in scratch projects, I was interested in the world of synchronous, real time collaborations.
Several live coding – visual and music live coding environments exist for achieving this goal at a high level. But nothing of the sort existed for kids to play with. I decided to create a prototype of the idea using Scratch Blocks for 2 basic microworlds.
(a) A Turtle art microworld with only 2 movements – front/back and rotate.
(b) A Music microworld where one could add multiple notes and rests
This entire canvas was shared so any body clicking on the link would be able to see all the other art and listen to all the other music currently being created.
Here I demonstrate the same with 2 computer screens accessing the same canvas from two different locations.
Manaswi Mishra 