Say What?!

Say What?! is a seven-part workshop that explores the relationship between empathy and civic engagement. The workshop fosters mutual understanding, collaborative problem-solving, and self-expression.

How might communities use it?
The curriculum--which employs Scratch as a central tool--builds capacities in three areas: programming, storytelling, and perspective-taking. Throughout the workshop, participants use a variety of tools and techniques to engage in acts of personal expression by creating rich, interactive, multi-threaded narratives.

At what stage of development is it?
The workshop was developed through our interactions with Citizen Schools, a national network of after-school apprenticeship programs. For several months, we worked with a group of 10 middle-school students to learn programming, create stories, and cultivate perspective-taking skills. Some of the artifacts that the students created, including the projects they shared at the workshop's culminating event, can be seen at http://saywhatcs.net.

In the summer of 2008, Shaundra Daily adapted the Say What?! curriculum for use on XO laptops purchased by Birmingham, Alabama. During a four-week summer camp, a condensed version of the workshop was used with elementary school students before they moved into creating projects to teach their community about healthcare issues. Projects included a Scratch newscast about living with diabetes, an interactive story introducing the plethora of emotions that people might have during their lives, and a themed game helping people understand how the brain works. Students presented their projects to a number of community and political leaders, their parents, and friends: