Octopi

Octopi

Diana Franklin, Charlotte Hill

Octopi is a new variant of Scratch that we are developing for use in elementary education. It is designed for an approach of guided exploration using scaffolded examples. In other words, the instructor is able to use anything in Scratch to provide rich starting points for the student. The student is provided bounded exploration by being given a subset of the Scratch blocks to implement a piece of the larger project.

There are two versions of the software.

  • OctopiDeveloper is used if you want to create new projects for others to complete.. You can hide parts of the GUI so that students do not get distracted by features they are not using. The intent is also to build confidence by making students feel they have mastered what they can see.
  • OctopiStudent is what students use to complete the projects created with OctopiDeveloper. If you are using the KELP CS curriculum, this is the version you should install on all of the computers in your computer lab.

Installation instructions:

    Mac - Download Octopi by clicking on the appropriate link to the right. Unzip the folder and place it in the applications directory.
  • PC - Download and install Scratch 1.4. Note your installation location. Then download octopi by clicking on the link to the right. Go into the installation location and copy in the media files and the image file. Move the Scratch.image file to a different location. Rename the .exe and/or the image file so that the image file and exe file have the same name, like Octopi.exe and Octopi.image. The shortcut may not work - you may need to make a new shortcut.
The biggest challenge is getting Octopi to associate with octopi and scratch files (.oct and .sb). If you are having trouble, first open Octopi, and then open the project you want from within Octopi.



This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CNS-0940491 and CNS-1240985.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

People

Faculty

Diana Franklin

Students

Charlotte Hill

Software

Octopi Student

For Mac: octopistudent.zip
For PC: octopistudentpc.zip

Octopi Developer

For Mac and PC: octopideveloper.zip