Fostering innovative education through OctoStudio
A young girl in an undisclosed location has created a unique and personalized birthday gift for her grandmother using the mobile coding app, OctoStudio. This innovative app, developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Lab, allows users to create animated stories, interactive projects, and musical instruments on their phones or tablets.
OctoStudio stands out for its user-friendly interface, utilising block-based coding to bring projects to life. It combines emojis, photos, drawings, sounds, and movements, allowing for a wide range of creative possibilities. The app also uses device sensors like tilting, shaking, and magnetic input to make projects interactive.
The girl's birthday card project, for instance, uses family photos and a personalized singing greeting, making it a heartfelt and memorable gift. The card is animated, adding a touch of excitement and surprise for the recipient.
OctoStudio also supports sharing and collaboration via Bluetooth "beam" messaging, enabling users to exchange their creations easily. This feature has been used by schoolchildren in Chile, who are using the app to document and learn about their local environment. They take photos of plants and animals and use them to create animated stories, demonstrating the app's educational potential.
In Uganda, two friends have created an interactive game featuring an animated chicken. The chicken responds to the tilt of the phone and speaks Swahili when it finds water, making it a fun and culturally relevant game.
OctoStudio is designed as an educational tool to foster creativity, coding skills, and problem-solving in an accessible, ad-free, offline-capable environment available in over 20 languages. It is free, with no ads, no data collection, and offline use, making it an attractive option for families and educators.
The app's creators, the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Lab, are renowned for their work on Scratch, another popular educational coding platform. OctoStudio extends this success into mobile contexts, engaging young learners by providing a playful yet powerful creative coding platform on mobile devices.
Today, OctoStudio is being released publicly, opening up a world of creative possibilities for users worldwide. Whether you're creating a personalized birthday card, an interactive game, or an animated story about your local environment, OctoStudio provides the tools to bring your ideas to life.
- The unique birthday gift created by the girl, using OctoStudio, showcases its potential for education-and-self-development, as she learned mobile coding.
- The public release of OctoStudio allows the public, particularly schoolchildren, to use technology like this app for researching and learning about their local environment.
- As OctoStudio is user-friendly and accessible, it encourages the public to participate in environmental research by creating interactive projects and animated stories highlighting their local lifestyle.
