Welcome to PLIX OctoStudio! Bring the physical world into interactive stories, animations, and games on mobile devices with easy on-the-go creative coding.
🥰 Ages 8+ 🕐 1–1.5 Hours 👩👧👦 up to 10 Participants 🍎 1–2 Facilitators 📱Tablet or phone 🎨 Craft Materials
Whether you are new to block-based coding, or are a whiz at Scratch, OctoStudio is a playful app that (sneakily) introduces the principles of programming to ages 8+ while having fun.
What We ❤️ About This Activity
By exploring ways to bring themselves into a project through voice or images, learners can begin telling a story or creating a game. Craft materials can be used to extend the activity into the physical world. This is a great way for young people (of all ages!) to see themselves represented in code.
Workshop Prompts & Gallery
Prompts from PLIX
PLIX Community Remixes
PLIX Community Book Connections
Press Here by Hervé Tullet—the perfect story to pair with a project that's activated by a tap! Recommended by the Tinkering Studio. Ages 5+
External Resources
Check out these OctoStudio explorations by the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium!
Play with Patterns Dive into surprising ways to experiment with patterns, symmetry, and repetition.
Bring a Book to Life Use stories, scenes, and characters as inspiration for your projects!
Making Faces Arrange materials to make portraits and animate them with code.
Hack a Magazine Hide coded surprises inside the pages of a magazine.
Materials
Supply Kit
Zine
Zine ↓
Remixable Zine ↓
Spark Cards ↓
Facilitation
Playtest and Plan
- Choose one of our prompts, or come up with a prompt that suits your library community. Our activity guides are for getting you started—feel free to change or create new design elements to suit your local community! All PLIX activity guides are designed for a minimum of 1–2 facilitators
- Gather materials and print out the zine.
- Make an example project. Try it out with friends and colleagues. Thoughtfully incomplete, good examples feature a variety of approaches and starting points. Use them to inspire learners to make something uniquely their own. Guide to Making Activity Examples →
- Try the activity with your patrons. Set a date and time. Easily promote your workshop with our editable OctoStudio flyer template →
- Populate your workshop space with diverse example projects. Create and play together!
- Reflect on what you’ve done and consider doing a remix!
Facilitation Tips
This activity is designed to invite learners of all backgrounds into tinkering with circuits and electronics. The materials used in this activity are intentionally low-cost and friendly to encourage participants to try new things, mess around, make mistakes, and experiment. When facilitating this activity, we encourage you to support this tinkering mindset!
Click on the toggles to learn more ↓
Every few minutes, switch who works on the project, adding new surprises each time!
While one person adds blocks to the project, the other person makes suggestions for fun blocks to try out!
Work on different parts of your idea, then reconnect! Try something with craft materials when the other person is on the device.
About PLIX OctoStudio
OctoStudio is a creative coding app developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab.
Other ways to engage with PLIX OctoStudio
- Questions? Ask them on the PLIX Discussion Forum!
- Share your experience running this activity on Twitter or Instagram and tag us @heyplix