Last Saturday May 18 spaces of entrepreneurship and digital social innovation of the Torre del Roser hosted the Scratch Day UOC, a workshop aimed at children (from 8 to 12 years) and to their families where they could be created from small animations to video games while playing programming with the Scratch tool.

This day 'Scratch Day UOC: play to program, program playing' was held on the occasion of the 15 years of the Computer, Multimedia and Telecommunications Studies (EIMT) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and was also part of an international event devoted to this programming environment aimed at children and young people in order to promote creative thinking and work on the methodology of computational thinking .

In order to make the most of the experience each child had to come accompanied by an adult and each couple (adult-child) had to bring a laptop to participate in the workshop without difficulties throughout the morning.

The activity was aimed primarily at children (from 8 to 12 years old) and to their families (and did not require any previous knowledge), and tried to show that creating video games and animations is not as complicated as it seems. That's why Scratch was used as a tool to explore, experiment and express ideas creatively and fun through interactive stories, games, music and art. Fun, imagination and learning were guaranteed!

The seminar, which was held on Saturday, from 9.30 a.m. to 2 p.m., was held simultaneously at various headquarters of the UOC: Girona, Lleida, Reus, Terrassa and Sant Feliu de Llobregat. In Sant Feliu de Llobregat, 11 couples (adult-infant) participated and the activity was a success.

In particular, the activity consisted of a free initiation workshop at Scratch and then the methodology was used learn-by-doing ('learning to do') to develop and foster the creation of everything that the imagination contributed. The objective was not to learn to program, but to learn to think by promoting creativity.

The curiosity was his best teacher: in each session, they had to disassemble and find out how a project has already been made. Through this reverse engineering process, future programmers understood all the details of what they saw finished and working, learning all of the mechanisms behind them. In conclusion, exercises and projects were proposed to be implemented by putting into play all the concepts worked so far.

What they learned: playing, they understood in a simple way how computers are programmed.

What could be done: cartoons, retouching images automatically, making and playing sounds from more than 100 different instruments or even creating games like Tetris or Pacman

The workshop was divided into the following parts:

• 9:30 p.m. 10:00 am Arrival and preparation of the surroundings
• 10:00 am? 10.30 am Brief introduction to Scratch
• 10.30 am? 11.30 am Use of the Scratch Cards
• 12.00? 1 pm Maze game
• 1:30 p.m. 2:00 pm Share projects in the common gallery for all the venues

Scratch is a programming environment developed by MIT ( Massachusetts Institute of Technology ) aimed at children and young people in order to foster creative thinking. All stacking instructions as if they were blocks of a set of constructions, can be created from small animations to video games and interactive artworks. Following the wake of Papert's construction learning theory, Scratch offers the possibility of starting the competence to learn to learn in a fun and motivating way.

All the boys and girls like the games of constructions, with pieces of colors that are mounted on top of each other. But what would happen if the construction we just finished would behave like a computer program, able to do what we say? Well, you can not miss out on the next Scratch Day, so you know, playing Scratch with the environment, the funniest and most creative way to understand how computers work. By joining blogs with others, in a few minutes, the smallest ones build small programs that move their drawings on the screen, make musical sounds or can speak with their own voice, while intuitively implementing programming concepts.

This is the power of Scratch, a visual programming language that is a fantastic pedagogical tool to teach children (and not so small) to think under logical criteria, to analyze problems and to find new solutions, and that promotes critical and analytical thinking, develops creativity and innovation.

There is a virtual community of Scratch with more than 1,400,000 members and more 3,100,000 projects from around the world.

The UOC is an online university with an innovative educational model internationally recognized with a community of over 60,000 students and 3,700 faculty and experts.

The local headquarters of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) is located on the first floor of the Torre del Roser, a municipal space in the heart of the city of Sant Feliu de Llobregat that houses all kinds of digital initiatives and entrepreneurship and innovative agents in the territory, and carries out public-private collaboration actions aimed at consolidating the local culture of innovation and micro-innovation, valuing the entrepreneurial spirit, co-creation and talent, and giving recognition to initiatives that make a social use of technology, generating innovation and promoting the visibility and enhancement of innovative experiences and success stories, new business models focused on the creation of content and services through the Web as well as social innovation community and digital. In addition to a high-performance YUZZ center for the development of a technology-based and fast-growing (talented) start-up business creation program, Torre del Roser has an ICT Point with coworking dynamics. .