Scratch - Welcome to Programming for Elementary Students

Scratch is a free download from MIT where students can create stories, games and animations! Elementary students learn programming skills. Teachers can integrate this tool with language arts, science, social studies and even meet many new NETS-S. I would love for my students to learn Scratch with your students to communicate their understandings and collaborate on projects.

My fifth grade technology classes have learned wikispaces and we are ready to use this technology in other subjects. Writing and communication skills are possible areas I have in mind. Anyone interested in trading ideas for Scratch projects or even commenting on student work??

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Comment by James Hollis on October 15, 2007 at 7:23am: Hi JoNelle,

This looks very promising although I'm not very happy because I'll probably spend all my free time playing around with Scratch. I love the concept of kids creating their own applications. It's such a great lesson in logic and allows students to be creative.

I'll comment again after I play around a little.

Comment by samccoy on October 15, 2007 at 8:22pm: Really cool blog. Like the Voki.

Do you belong to TappedIn? The reason I ask is that I have had Squeak and Scratch downloaded for some time, and I learned about them in collaborative, professional development sessions at the TappedIN campus.

Last July, Dr. Randall Caton presented his work with Squeak, and tonight he gave another presentation at TappedIN.
"Squeak is the basis for many new collaborative programming environments and exciting developments. It is free for you to use and you are limited only by your imagination. Scratch is written in Squeak for middle school students." - TappedIn blurb for 10/15/07 Squeak meeting

If you don't belong to the TappedIN community, I would like to invite you. Check it out: http://www.tappedin.org There are several Classroom2.0 neighbors who are also TappedIN neighbors.

Comment by Marielle Lange on October 16, 2007 at 4:15am: A way to introduce students to basic concepts of programming is to have them play this game:

ChipWitts II

You have to pilot a little Robot, by sending him instructions (move left, right, pick object, repeat 2 times, etc.).

It looks like a commercial project. But this can give great ideas on how to design a few introductory lessons to familiarize kids with basic concepts.

That's the best "learning to program for young kids" resource I have come across.

Comment by Tod Baker on October 16, 2007 at 3:28pm: The students in our iKids Club began to explore Scratch yesterday afternoon. We plan to create something and connect to others using Scratch. We would like to trade ideas with you. Please join us at ikidsclub.ning.com.

Comment by Marielle Lange on October 17, 2007 at 4:23am: Did you have a chance to read the book "Mindstorm" by Papert. Papert is the founder of Logo (the little turtle moving over the screen). Scratch is produced by the same team and some email exchange with them suggest that they agree that Scratch is the Logo of the 21st century.

That book gives you some good insight about how to use a program like scratch in the classroom. For instance, it highlights the importance of getting to grip with the concept of debugging.

Again, the same notion that comes up (I mean many of the forum posts address this issue in one way or another). To become good at programming, you have to learn not to avoid errors but to accept that errors happen and try and understand what the cause of the errors you made could be.

I haven't had the time to learn scratch properly yet. I intend to, though. I believe it could be put to excellent use to have kids produce material to support their own learning.

For an excellent example of this, check out this report: What are the Learning Outcomes When Young Children Create and Use T...

Comment by Marielle Lange on October 17, 2007 at 4:44am: on the chipwits link, I inadvertendly left some trailing space which cause the link to fail.

The URL is : http://www.chipwits.com/

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