History, Language Arts, Programming, and Making: Cross-Curricular Candescence in Grades 4 and 5

The first cycle of the year is officially behind us, so it is time to detail the learning adventures our 4th and 5th grade students undertook this time around in the lab.

The 5th graders had a project that is something of an extension of the interactive posters the 3rd grade worked on. Students had their choice of several historical figures to research. Each group had a somewhat different set of people. There was some overlap, but each list was more different that it was similar. I wanted to have a variety of topics, and students, when given a choice of topics like this, tend to latch on to the names they have heard before. They used a variety of sources to gather information including BrainPop and Worldbook Online.

Once they had conducted their research, students set to work creating a Scratch project that shared details about the lives and contributions of their selected topics. Their programs were required to have a minimum of 5 key press events in order to make the final product interactive. They were also required to include at least one image of their person.

The final piece of this project was to transform an old soda bottle (or other ) cylindrical container into a model of their chosen historical figure. They were to make every effort to match the clothing of the time period in which their subject lived. That proved to be an interesting challenge as students tried to make Victorian dresses for Ada Lovelace and aviator goggles for Amelia Earhart with construction paper. These models were then placed on a stand, or in some cases fitted with buttons directly and connected to the Scratch program with a Makey Makey (an input/output device similar to a keyboard, but with conductive pads instead of keys).

I am really pleased with how well most of these projects turned out. The students created a number of clever programs and models to share their work. It is always wonderful to see students take a project in a completely unexpected direction. The Scratch projects are collected in this studio.

As for the 4th graders, they took a big step forward with their Scratch programming skills and learned how to use lists and variables in new ways. In a computer program, a variable is a single value that can change while the program is running. Examples of variables include a player's score, number lives, and timers. A list on the other hand stores several pieces of information, as the name implies. A program might have lists for questions and answers, or one to track the highest scores.


The first program the students worked on was a random compliment generator. They created a list of kind adjectives and another list of animals. First, the program had to ask the user for their name and store it as a variable. Then it replied with the user's name and a compliment created by joining a random adjective and a random noun from the two lists and joining those elements with the rest of the sentence. For example: "Quentin, your are a shiny unicorn!" They learned a number of things about sentence structure and that computers do not know when you want a space between words and when you don't. Some students even added a second list of adjectives for for fulsome compliments.


The second program pushed the classes' knowledge of parts of speech and sentence structure to the limit. They coded a mad lib. They began by writing a 4 sentence story and then selecting the words that would be replaced by user input. The program asked the user for those words based on the part of speech and stored them in a list. Then the program inserted the user's words into the story the programmer wrote. It took a great deal of trail and error and no small amount of problem solving to get the words placed correctly with proper spacing and punctuation. It was a huge challenge and the students were rightfully proud of themselves when they finally got everything functioning as intended.

Here is the studio where the projects are collected.

Makey Makey That Poster Interactive!

The first grading cycle of the year is nearly over, and I find myself a little bit behind on my blog posting schedule. I will do my best to get caught up and to stay on track starting now.

The third graders started the year by "graduating" to the full version of the Scratch programming language. Student who were at Sinclair for second grade got an introduction to Scratch at the end of last year. They only used the offline version and so were not able to share projects or interact with the Scratch online community. So before they began their projects for this unit, they logged into Scratch for the first time. That was after a thorough discussion of the responsibilities of being a member of an online community and correct digital etiquette.

That done, students got to work on the actual project. Students selected a topic to research. Each class had different topic choices in order to have a greater diversity of projects. They used BrainPop and Britannica School to gather information on their chosen subjects and took notes in their journals. The next step involved planning and programming a Scratch project to share their learning. Their programs were required to utilize key press events to run different scripts to share information. I also showed them how to import images to Scratch that were downloaded from the online encyclopedia, and how to cite their work.

Once the programs were finished, students moved on to creating a poster that complemented their programming project. The poster designs were entirely up to the students, and it was interesting to see the choices they made about what information to highlight.

The final step of this project is to make the project interactive. This is done by adding brass fasteners as "buttons" and using copper foil tape as wires. We use a device called a Makey Makey to connect the poster to the Scratch program. It is an input/output board (sort of like a keyboard). The board interprets contact with the buttons as key presses triggering the scripts in the program. So as users touch different points on the poster, different elements of the program run on screen.

Projects like these that use Scratch as a means for students to share their learning are an essential element of the Sinclair STEM Lab program. One of my goals is that students learn to use computer programming to complete tasks, as a tool for doing work as well as for personal expression. Only a small fraction of the students who pass through the lab are likely to become computer programmers or software engineers. But every student that spends time in the Sinclair STEM Lab leaves knowing that computer programming is something that they CAN do, even if they choose not to.