LearningForward

Kent Chesnut's technology in education blog.

I’ve been preparing to lead a 4 day (~2 hrs / day) Scratch class in conjunction with my Church’s Summer Fun Days.  The class will be about 12 - 15 kids going into the 3rd - 5th grade (about 8 - 10 years old).  I’ll probably post more about this later, but today I’d like to discuss the resources I’ll be using.

• How to Use Scratch Intro video - link.  Note it’s the right video on the first row of videos.  I’ll use the largest TV I can get my hands on to show this to the kids.
• Scratch cards - link here.  These pdfs can be printed and used by the class students.  Each card illustrates a specific example, like “Moving Animation” and “Follow the Mouse”.  I plan to have several sets of these sitting on a table for the kids to look through and try out
• Scratch 1.2.1.  I used the older version because the old Windows 98 computers we have in our lab didn’t run Scratch 1.3. 
• Simple projects.  To extend / combine the Scratch card examples.

Instructional Strategy 

I’m not planning on “teaching” much at all.  I’ll give an overview of some key concepts.  I’ll walk through an example card activity.  Then turn the kids loose.  I’ll encourage them to try a card activity that looks interesting and then get them to work on projects of their own choosing.  My helper (my daughter Brittany) and I will try to serve mainly as collaborators / colearners to support the kids when they decide they need help.  Kids will be encouraged to work together, seek advice from each other, and have fun.

Challenges and Solutions

• Intrinsic Motivation / Identifying projects of personal interest
  I’m not going to make project assignments.  The goal is for the students to work on projects that are personally relevant and interesting.  I think that providing the Scratch Cards and a few example programs geared toward this age kids should help them identify personal projects quickly.  Some brainstorming with my daughter led to the following as possible projects of interest:
  •  drive a car
  • fly a plane
  • take care of a pet or baby
  • virtual pet
  • decorate a room
  • have a party
  • dress up
  • video game
  • blow up stuff
• Saving / Accessing files:
  The computers are networked with a shared folder for the Computer Camp on each.  Instead of teaching the kids to navigate to the Computer Camp folder, I put an empty project (read-only) into the Computer Camp folder.  We’ll teach the kids to start Scratch by opening the empty project.  Then they will save to the desired folder by default.
• Share and Tell:
  I certainly hope the kids will create projects they wish to show off to the others in the class.  If saving files to the Computer Camp folder works as hoped, I’ll be able to pull up any of the kids projects from the laptop connected to the TV and use the large TV for share and tell.

Educational Goals

Read Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms - Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas for a good explanation of how such creative activities can help students connect with powerful ideas in Mathematics and other “school” type subjects (highly recommended).  However, the goals for this class are affective and motivational.  Specifically, I want the students:

• to feel satisfaction in a creative endeavor
• to experience joy in learning something new
• to feel capable of learning to use a computer programming language

If this positive affect spills over into other areas of their lives - like school - that’ll be ok too.

I plan to report back on how the class goes.