Report project as a "Scratch Copy"

"Own Your Own" (OYO) requires people to have respect for source authenticity. Over the years, our dev team has fielded many complaints from students about the ease with which "open source" Scratch projects may be copied, and advanced as one's own creation erroneously. While our team supports open source software, we also encourage creating original projects and authentic skills in the Hatch! app, and if people are remixing another person's project, it is important that people don't forget to give credits to the original creator in the project description. 

This topic has gotten more attention as the projects imported from the Scratch website that didn't give any credits to the original project authors grew in number. As a result, as of today in our Hatch! app, if students find such "Scratch-Copy" project, they can click the "Report as Scratch Copy" button in the project page:

Then they can input the original Scratch project link in the pop-up modal and submit it for review:

Once the Hatch! manager confirms a project is indeed a "Scratch-Copy", the manager will mark it as such, and in the project page, you will see an extra warning/information section looking like this:

Once a project is marked as "Scratch-copy", it will be taken out from the "Explore" page for community discovery, and can only be shared personally by accounts. Reminder: ALL Scratch projects are open source, and can be copied. The act of forking or remixing a Scratch project is not inherently a bad thing, but omitting source creator from credits can be. Our hope is this feature will help solve this issue of authenticity in student work.

"Unicorn" a project!

As we love original and creative ideas, now if students think a project is "unique", they can "unicorn" a project in the project page to give it special status:

To celebrate these projects and work of creativity, the most unique projects will be shown under the "Explore" tab in the new "Recent Most Unique Projects" section:

Our hope is to make it easier to identify cloned work copied from the Sratch.MIT.Edu website, and to provide celebration of the authentic creative leadership that project creators demonstrate every time they invest the effort to build skills and build new projects with code. It has become very easy to mis-understand the intent of open source software, that being to provide empowerment to creators, and instead to use the work of others in degrading ways, whether intentionally or by ignorance. We look forward to celebrating more authenticity in people's creative leadership!