Socl has been a wonderful outlet for creative expression, as well as a place to enjoy a supportive community of like-minded people, sharing and learning together. In supporting you, Socl’s unique community of creators, we have learned invaluable lessons in what it takes to establish and maintain community as well as introduce novel new ways to make, share and collect digital stuff we love. Through you we’ve been able to introduce many interesting ideas such as:

• Collages; beautiful posts of content discovered through search and auto-assembled
  
• Riffs; themed conversations based on community inspiration
• Automatic Translation; seamlessly spanning languages and culture
  
• Collections; telling your story through collections of posts
  
• Picotales, Video Parties, Blinks, Kodu - new ways to create and share

From the very beginning, we’ve been amazed by your creativity, openness, and positivity. Thank you so very much for sharing your inspirations with us. 

The So.cl Team

This year, FUSE Labs collaborated with Martin Luther King Jr Elementary and Highland Middle School to host a computer science workshop for students in Seattle Public Schools and Bellevue School District. The workshop was a four-day learning experience geared towards exposing students to computer science and inspiring them to pursue STEM related fields. Following a rigorous process emphasizing design and coding, 50 students from 9-14 years old had their first coding experience using a free Microsoft application, Kodu. 

In this session, students were introduced to basic coding concepts and design skills using Kodu. We coached students on designing terrain as well as coding their first single player game, multiplayer game, and autonomous game. With just a few days of instruction, students 9-14-year-old were already engineering their own Kodu multiplayer mob game and racing game with beautiful terrain and responsive obstacles.

Students present their  Microsoft Kodu world to their teacher from Martin Luther King Jr Elementary,  Ben Lawton 

A student tests her new  world with Kodu workshop trainer, Michael Braun 

A student presents his  Microsoft Kodu world to Highland Middle School teacher, Dennis Crane

“People can’t get  jobs, and we have jobs that can’t be filled” says Brad Smith, Microsoft  President.

The percentage of CS  degrees earned by women has actually been going down since peaking around 37%  in 1984.  Currently it’s closer to 18% of the degrees being earned by  women. Hopefully, by exposing girls to CS early, we can capture their  imagination before they’re told that CS is for boys. - Computer World

There are likely to be  150,000 computing jobs opening up each year through 2020, according to an  analysis of federal forecasts by the Association of Computing Machinery, a  professional society for computer researchers. But despite the hoopla around  start-up celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, fewer than 40,000  American students received bachelor’s degrees in computer science during  2010, the National Center for Education Statistics estimates. - Fostering Tech Talent in Schools

FUSE Labs has been curating Kodu curriculum that combines design and computer science with subjects in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) targeting 9-14-year-old students will little to no coding experience. The Kodu curriculum and supporting lessons focus on understanding design and coding in the setting of a classroom, club, and camp. The curriculum has been tested with elementary and middle school students.

A student build a fully functional multiplayer competition with keyboard and mouse input, which keeps track of the points scored by submarines collecting seashells underwater. The Kodu app serves as an open-ended game creation tool where the students design their own terrain, create their own directions, and code their own characters.

With a single player game creation, another student programed a racing game with six autonomous characters and a single player entangled in competition to reach the finish, the castle, first. The autonomous characters each followed their own path designed by the student. The student designed the racetrack with hidden minefields to avoid along the racecourse.

The Kodu students shared their interest in pursuing computer science and future opportunities in technology companies. As our world becomes ever more technologically advanced, proficiency in computer science will become more critical for employment opportunities and professional success. We must therefore encourage learning of these skills from an early age. With the support of free applications like Kodu, we can teach our students to go one step further, becoming creators—not just consumers—of technology. We look forward to engaging with future Kodu-based events to spark the imaginations of the next generation of engineers.