Derek Breen

Derek Breen began his first job, a daily paper route, back in 1980 with the intention of saving up enough money to buy his first computer. He purchased a Commodore 64 computer toward the end of sixth grade and spent most of the summer before starting junior high designing sprites, learning the Basic programming language and coding rudimentary games.

Derek was introduced to Scratch while working as a summer instructor for ID Tech Camp at MIT in 2011. While he could appreciate how the software enabled younger children to quickly produce animation and simple games, the pixelated graphics and programming limitations kept him from considering using it in the high school computer science classes he was hired to teach that fall.

Then Scratch 2.0 came along and suddenly his mind was blown by all of the possibilities. The addition of vector graphics, cloning and cloud-based variables added enough power to make it a complete multimedia-authoring platform, basically Adobe Flash for kids.

Derek is a founding member of the Instructional Design and Educational Media Association (IDIEM) and is an active member of the Scratch Educator (ScratchEd) community (scratched.gse.harvard.edu). Most recently, he worked as a graphic designer on the StarLogo Nova project (www.slnova.org) at MIT, as a teaching fellow in Instructional Design at Harvard Extension school and as a curriculum developer for i2 Camp (www.i2camp.org).

Previously, Derek worked as a digital arts teacher at Prospect Hills Academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the owner/operator of Mod, a cybercafé and digital learning center in Charlottesville, Virginia, and served as a new media producer for KCAL9-TV in Los Angeles, California.

On January 29, 2018 Derek publicly disclosed he had advanced brain cancer, discovered in 2014, which caused him to cease his international teaching and educational advocacy work in March, 2017. He died in Ajijic, Mexico on September 17, 2018.