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.
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