Renee – Creating a World of Cats
By Jodi Asbell-Clarke
The following is an excerpt from the book Reaching and Teaching Neurodivergent Learners: Strategies for Embracing Uniquely Talented Problem Solvers, by Jodi Asbell-Clarke, Senior Scientist at TERC, published November 14, 2023 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
One of the grade 9 Tech Ed students in Mr. Jerrett’s class, whom I’ll call Renee, had autism. The first thing I noticed about Renee was that she wore loose clothes made of soft fabric and she appeared more juvenile than the other girls’ styles. Her hair was tangled in knots. Her social behaviors were awkward and she was alienated from the rest of her class.
Renee seemed to live in her own world. While she was withdrawn and rather sullen much of the time, she could also be highly excitable when talking about the thing that interested her—cats. Once Renee learned I worked with game designers, she marched right up to me and wanted to tell me all about the game she wanted to build. She set off into a rapid-fire monologue about a game with a cast of many cats and all their antics. It was very difficult for me to understand her. Most of her words were mumbled or seemed nonsensical to me, but she clearly had a vision in her head, and she was clearly very amused by this vision.
We introduced Renee to Scratch, an introductory coding environment that was designed by Mitch Resnick and his colleagues at MIT to enable learners to build animations and games while learning the basics of computer programming. I helped Renee create an account and, within minutes, she told me to go away. She had found everything she needed on the Scratch site, and therefore no longer required, nor desired, any help from others.
Over the next two months, while the rest of the class worked on a variety of projects, Renee persevered diligently on her game. Occasionally a burst of laughter would bubble up from her as she drilled persistently down on the keyboard. A few times when I’d stop by her workstation to see how she was progressing, she’d show me the latest clip of her cat’s extensive dialogue or the brilliant green outlandish outfit she’d created for the cat with the leading role. I wasn’t sure what type of product Renee was creating, or what the storyline was, but she sure was keeping busy.
Because Renee was on an IPP, she had modified outcome expectations, and what she was doing with Scratch would be acceptable for a passing grade, especially in TechEd, so we were not worried. We figured we could spend our time with other kids who demanded more attention. At the end of the term, Renee signed up for a slot to demonstrate her project to the class. Neither Ms Bradbury nor I knew what to expect, but I will be honest and say my expectations were not high. I was a bit anxious about what might happen when she stood in front of the class spewing her erratic tales of cats that no one could understand. Kids can be cruel, and I was afraid we were setting her up for a disaster.
Renee gave a 20-minute presentation in which she did not stop her rapid-fire monolog for one moment. No one else in the class could understand Renee’s story. The narrative meant nothing to us. We couldn’t make sense of what she was saying. But what was clearly appreciable by everyone in the class, however, was the extraordinary amount of intricate coding and artwork in her animation. Renee had mastered complex scene changes, the development of a long list of characters each with their own motion and prescribed dialogue, and built artistic transitions all using sophisticated features in the Scratch programming environment. Renee had built her own functions in Scratch that she named to correspond with each character, giving them their own ways of walking, jumping, and dancing around the screen. She had created time delays and event-driven phenomena to add a surprise element to her animation. As far as grade 8 coding projects I’ve seen in my career, it was a masterpiece.
Scratch gave Renee a way to communicate her zany, cat-filled world to us. The action of putting blocks of code together in patterns and algorithms that enabled her to make her world come alive delighted Renee in a way her teachers, her parents, and her classmates had never seen before. Scratch gave Renee her voice.
The following is an excerpt from the book Reaching and Teaching Neurodivergent Learners: Strategies for Embracing Uniquely Talented Problem Solvers, by Jodi Asbell-Clarke, Senior Scientist at TERC, published November 14, 2023 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
One of the grade 9 Tech Ed students in Mr. Jerrett’s class, whom I’ll call Renee, had autism. The first thing I noticed about Renee was that she wore loose clothes made of soft fabric and she appeared more juvenile than the other girls’ styles. Her hair was tangled in knots. Her social behaviors were awkward and she was alienated from the rest of her class.
Renee seemed to live in her own world. While she was withdrawn and rather sullen much of the time, she could also be highly excitable when talking about the thing that interested her—cats. Once Renee learned I worked with game designers, she marched right up to me and wanted to tell me all about the game she wanted to build. She set off into a rapid-fire monologue about a game with a cast of many cats and all their antics. It was very difficult for me to understand her. Most of her words were mumbled or seemed nonsensical to me, but she clearly had a vision in her head, and she was clearly very amused by this vision.
We introduced Renee to Scratch, an introductory coding environment that was designed by Mitch Resnick and his colleagues at MIT to enable learners to build animations and games while learning the basics of computer programming. I helped Renee create an account and, within minutes, she told me to go away. She had found everything she needed on the Scratch site, and therefore no longer required, nor desired, any help from others.
Over the next two months, while the rest of the class worked on a variety of projects, Renee persevered diligently on her game. Occasionally a burst of laughter would bubble up from her as she drilled persistently down on the keyboard. A few times when I’d stop by her workstation to see how she was progressing, she’d show me the latest clip of her cat’s extensive dialogue or the brilliant green outlandish outfit she’d created for the cat with the leading role. I wasn’t sure what type of product Renee was creating, or what the storyline was, but she sure was keeping busy.
Because Renee was on an IPP, she had modified outcome expectations, and what she was doing with Scratch would be acceptable for a passing grade, especially in TechEd, so we were not worried. We figured we could spend our time with other kids who demanded more attention. At the end of the term, Renee signed up for a slot to demonstrate her project to the class. Neither Ms Bradbury nor I knew what to expect, but I will be honest and say my expectations were not high. I was a bit anxious about what might happen when she stood in front of the class spewing her erratic tales of cats that no one could understand. Kids can be cruel, and I was afraid we were setting her up for a disaster.
Renee gave a 20-minute presentation in which she did not stop her rapid-fire monolog for one moment. No one else in the class could understand Renee’s story. The narrative meant nothing to us. We couldn’t make sense of what she was saying. But what was clearly appreciable by everyone in the class, however, was the extraordinary amount of intricate coding and artwork in her animation. Renee had mastered complex scene changes, the development of a long list of characters each with their own motion and prescribed dialogue, and built artistic transitions all using sophisticated features in the Scratch programming environment. Renee had built her own functions in Scratch that she named to correspond with each character, giving them their own ways of walking, jumping, and dancing around the screen. She had created time delays and event-driven phenomena to add a surprise element to her animation. As far as grade 8 coding projects I’ve seen in my career, it was a masterpiece.
Scratch gave Renee a way to communicate her zany, cat-filled world to us. The action of putting blocks of code together in patterns and algorithms that enabled her to make her world come alive delighted Renee in a way her teachers, her parents, and her classmates had never seen before. Scratch gave Renee her voice.
9/1/2025
AuthorJodi Asbell-Clarke is co-founder of EdGE at TERC, a research and development group exploring the intersection of STEM and neurodiversity. Her academic background includes an MA in Math, an MSc in Astrophysics, and a PhD in Education.
SummaryThis is the fifth blog post in a series of excerpts from Jodi Asbell-Clarke’s book, Reaching and Teaching Neurodivergent Learners: Strategies for Embracing Uniquely Talented Problem Solvers. It introduces Renee, a cat enthusiast who used Scratch to share her imagination.
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