Scratch – Is it a tool we should be providing for our students?
I’m not a programmer, but I’ve always been interested in trying to make a computer do something I told it to do. From the early text-based adventure games where my “yes or no” selection could cause unique things to happen I was hooked! One of my graduate courses introduced me to BASIC programming. I was very proud of the Math program I wrote but even prouder of the wonderful things my 8th grade students created! The students used logical thinking, mathematical reasoning and developed lots of patience and teamwork skills through the process of getting their programs to do what they wanted them to do. It was very clear that the students enjoyed making computers do things even more than they enjoyed reacting to a program someone else had written.
Over the years I’ve explored Logo, Stagecast Creator and Microworlds. These are all wonderful programs that allow the user to be creative and in control of the computer but I had very limited opportunities to use them with students. They weren’t part of the programs on the computers where I was teaching and there was no funding to add them.
Now there is Scratch to add to the mix. Scratch was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab in collaboration with the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Their purpose was to help young students (ages 8 and up) learn 21st Century skills. To quote from their website, “As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.” Best of all, Scratch is available as a FREE download for both Mac and Windows platforms!
James Daly has posted a very nice write up about Scratch at the Edutopia website. You can learn a lot more about what has been happening with the tool in its first year by reading his article. One of the key things which intrigues me is that, via the Scratch website, Scratch users can upload their creations for feedback and collaboration. More than 175,000 projects have been placed on the site in the first year! Many of the projects have been created by students outside of the school day. How cool is that?
From the time I first heard about Scratch I had the best of intentions to explore it and begin to think about how it could be used to enhance learning, but I never found the time until I was at NECC 2008. One of the “Bring Your Own Laptop” sessions was “Using Scratch to Teach Programming at the Elementary Level” and the description stated, “Participants will acquire the skills needed to use Scratch and teach programming.” That was enough to hook me. I went to the session and the facilitator, Christopher Michaud from Georgia, did not disappoint. 120 “students” in the room did not daunt him. He even provided differentiated instruction by letting independent learners use the tutorials on his website while he gave direct, step-by-step instructions to those of us who wanted to learn that way. By the end of the hour I had created a “Pac-Man style” game where my dog would move around the maze eating food for points that showed up on my scoreboard! I was impressed, not only with my project, but with the potential Scratch has to engage learners in higher-level thinking, mathematical reasoning, collaboration, design and story writing.
If you’d like to learn how to use Scratch too, download it from the Scratch website and take advantage of Christopher Michaud’s wonderful project tutorials via this link. If you decide Scratch has educational value for the students you work with and you move forward to ask to have it on the computers at your school, please let us know! We’d love to follow you on this adventure and learn from your experiences.
Laura Cummings, MACUL SIGTELE Director
Add comment August 1st, 2008
