Build in Progress is a platform for sharing the story of your design process. With Build in Progress, makers document as they develop their design processes, incorporating iterations along the way and getting feedback as they develop their projects.

At Computer Clubhouse after-school centers, young people (ages 10-18) from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. Clubhouse members work on projects based on their own interests, with support from adult mentors. By creating their own animations, interactive stories, music videos, and robotic constructions, Clubhouse members become more capable, confident, and creative learners. The first Clubhouse was established in 1993, as a collaboration between the Lifelong Kindergarten group and The Computer Museum (now part of the Boston Museum of Science). Since then the network has expanded to more than 100 centers in 20 countries, serving more than 25,000 young people annually. In 2015 the Computer Clubhouse changed its name to The Clubhouse Network. The Lifelong Kindergarten group continues to develop new technologies, introduce new educational approaches, and lead professional-development workshops for Clubhouses around the world.

In Family Creative Learning, we engage parents and children in workshops to design and learn together with creative technologies, like the Scratch programming language and the MaKey MaKey invention kit. Just as children's literacy can be supported by parents reading with them, children's creativity can be supported by parents creating with them. In these workshops, we especially target families with limited access to resources and social support around technology. By promoting participation across generations, these workshops engage parents in supporting their children in becoming creators and full participants in today's digital society.

More and more computational activities revolve around collecting, accessing, and manipulating large sets of data, but introductory approaches for learning programming typically are centered around algorithmic concepts and flow of control, not around data. Computational exploration of data, especially data-sets, has been usually restricted to predefined operations in spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel. This project builds on the Scratch programming language and environment to allow children to explore data and datasets. With the extensions provided by this project, children can build Scratch programs to not only manipulate and analyze data from online sources, but also to collect data through various means such as surveys and crowd-sourcing. This toolkit will support many different types of projects like online polls, turn-based multiplayer games, crowd-sourced stories, visualizations, information widgets, and quiz-type games.

Improving adult learning, especially for adults who are unemployed or unable to financially support their families, is a challenge that affects the future wellbeing of millions of individuals in the US. We are working with the Joyce Foundation, employers, learning researchers, and the Media Lab community to prototype three to five new models for adult learning that involve technology innovation and behavioral insights.

Media Lab Virtual Visit is intended to open up the doors of the Media Lab to people from all around the world. The visit is hosted on the Unhangout platform, a new way of running large-scale unconferences on the web that was developed at the Media Lab. It is an opportunity for students or potential collaborators to talk with current researchers at the Lab, learn about their work, and share ideas.

Procedural representations, enabled through programming, are a powerful tool for digital illustration, but writing code conflicts with the intuitiveness and immediacy of direct manipulation. Para is a digital illustration tool that uses direct manipulation to define and edit procedural artwork. Through creating and altering vector paths, artists can define iterative distributions and parametric constraints. Para makes it easier for people to create generative artwork, and creates an intuitive workflow between manual and procedural drawing methods.

Read Out Loud is an application that empowers adults learning English to turn almost any reading material into an experience to help them learn. Learners can take a picture of a page of text; the app then scans in the page and presents the learner with a host of additional tools to facilitate reading. They can read the text aloud, which helps learners who are more comfortable with spoken English understand what is written. They can also select words to translate them into their native language. With this prototype, we want to give adult learners more agency to learn from material that focuses on subjects they care about, as well as increase access to English language learning material. Any book from the public library could become learning material with support in their native language. Read Out Loud is a prototype within the larger Making Learning Work project.

Scratch Data Blocks is an NSF-funded project that extends the Scratch programming language to enable youth to analyze and visualize their own learning and participation in the Scratch online community. With Scratch Data Blocks, youth in the Scratch community can easily access, analyze, and represent data about the ways they program, share, and discuss Scratch projects.

The Scratch extension system enables anyone to extend the Scratch programming language through custom programming blocks written in JavaScript. The extension system is designed to enable innovating on the Scratch programming language itself, in addition to innovating with it through projects. With the extension system, anyone can write custom Scratch blocks that enable others to use Scratch to program hardware devices such as the LEGO WeDo, get data from online web-services such as weather.com, and use advanced web-browser capabilities such as speech recognition.

Slap Snap Tap combines wearable sensors with physical block programming to enable enhanced expression through movement. By slapping on a set of sensor straps, snapping in code that links movement triggers to sound actions, and tapping the sensors to activate a play experience, users can combine motion and sound in creative ways. A dancer can create music through movement; an athlete can add emphasis to her performance; demonstrators can synchronize and amplify a chant; and anyone can create sound effects for life moments. Slap Snap Tap is a method of the Slay Play endeavor which aims to broaden participation in computational creation by using movement as a pathway into computational thinking.

The Lifelong Kindergarten group is collaborating with the Museum of Science in Boston to develop materials and workshops that engage young people in "maker" activities in Computer Clubhouses around the world, with support from Intel. The activities introduce youth to the basics of circuitry, coding, crafting, and engineering. In addition, graduate students are testing new maker technologies and workshops for Clubhouse staff and youth. The goal of the initiative is to help young people from under-served communities gain experience and confidence in their ability to design, create, and invent with new technologies.