Youth as Media Art Designers: Workshops for Creative Coding

We describe our efforts to bring media arts into design work with the goals to introduce new expressive forms in programming to urban youth. We’re presenting the findings from a series of workshop organized together with professional media artists that focused on immersion, interaction, color and perspective using Scratch, a media-rich programming environment. Our findings illustrate that a focused introduction of these features can be easily accomplished and help young designers to become more sophisticated in their creative expression. In the discussion we outline suggestions for activity and theme designs for future workshops