During the first week of the unit I had students work through the built in tutorial lessons found in Scratch. After a brief introduction to the user interface, drawing their attention to the various palettes and drawing tools, I set them to work on the "Animate your name" lesson. Students worked in partner groups as pair programmers, taking turns as drivers and navigators. This partner work helps by lending each project 2 sets of eyes to read the directions and to watch for mistakes. Over the next few days, the students made a number of different games that employed a variety of programming techniques including different kinds of loops and conditional statements.
The second week began with an introduction to using broadcasts to control the flow and action in the programs. I started with a whole group example program using a knock knock joke. In the program the sprites each say their portion of the joke at the appropriate time. This is accomplished by coding each statement the sprites say as separate script, each initiated by a broadcast. The first task I set the groups was to program a simple conversation. Many elected to copy the knock knock format, but others decided to try to create an original conversation. Keeping their broadcasts in order proved challenging to many students. As the conversations grew in length and complexity (thanks to the addition of more sprites), the number of broadcasts also grew. They worked on programming conversations and stories all week. There was some frustration when all of the sprites started talking over each other. However, there was a lot of excellent debugging practice as well. By the end of the week, most groups had succeeded in creating a story with conversations, movements, and scene changes. No two stories were alike, which is the most wonderful thing about Scratch, the amount of creative freedom students can have while still working on the same assignment.
As I had done with second grade, I also taught Scratch Jr. lessons to the kindergarten and first graders. The focus was on using the various tools and giving the students time to explore and experiment. During this final unit, I wanted to begin to teach them how to use Scratch Jr. to show what they have learned about a topic similar to what the 3rd and 4th graders have been doing. So each day we started by watching a Brain Pop Jr. movie about a different topic; parts of a plant, frog life cycles, the seasons, etc. and made some kind of illustrated foldable paper display for the information gathered. The next class, after reviewing the previous day's topic, student pairs then worked in Scratch Jr. to create a program that shared what they knew about that subject. I offered some guidance about getting started for each topic, but most of the creative choices were left to the students. They had to learn about drawing their own sprites and backgrounds. They also had to master the Scratch Jr. version of broadcasts to initiate scene changes and sprite conversations. The most truly wonderful part of watching the students work on their programs was the moment each day when a student made a discovery and called to his or her neighbor and said, "Look at this!". The neighbor would inevitably ask, "How did you do that?" at which point the first student would teach what they had learned. In this way, discoveries spread across the room from all directions like ripples in a pond.
In the end, I am so proud of the amazing work these young coders have done and I am so excited to see where they will take this learning next year.
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