The mobile STEM Lab rolls on... Round 3 saw the primary grades build their creative coding skills by creating projects in Scratch Jr. Meanwhile, the middle grade worked on various research projects. Second grade's final product was physical, while 3rd and 4th made Scratch projects to share their learning. The fifth graders put their creative coding skills to the test using Scratch to make a still image interactive.
Kindergarten & First Grade
As you know, Kindergarten and 1st grade started the year with a unit of Code.org programming puzzles. Code.org is a great way to introduce students to computer programming concepts, but it is lacking in opportunities for creative self expression. Fortunately we have Scratch Jr which is a perfect creative complement to Code.org's structure.
Each lesson started with a guided coding activity allowing students to practice with the day's concept. In Kindergarten we covered different kinds of events and motions. We also used various control commands to change how fast our characters moved and to change from one scene to the next. The first graders reviewed some of the things they learned last year before moving on to events like "bump" and the messages. We also used loops to make our code more efficient. After the guided portion of the lesson, students were tasked with adding something to their project using the command or concept we had practiced. They were allowed to add whatever they wanted, so long as it included the requisite code. Once a student successfully demonstrated their code, they were allowed what we termed "creative time". During this portion of the lesson students were able to further explore and experiment in Scratch Jr. Each day I was impressed with the joyful creativity students put into their work. They drew their own characters and backgrounds and were playful engaged in creating personally meaningful projects with code.
Second Grade
In the STEM lab, 2nd grade is a year of transition. They move from lessons and projects that are geared towards practicing skills like programming and building to projects in which they have to apply those skills in the creation of a product that shares their learning or demonstrates an original application of those skills. This round's project for 2nd grade involved research on a few self-selected animals and the creation of a set of animal fact cards. The students used National Geographic Kids Animals as their main resource. They read about the animals and synthesized what they learned. For each animal they used an oversized notecard, writing facts on one side and drawing a picture of the animal on the other side.
Another activity from this round was Skype-a-Scientist. They match classrooms with scientists from a variety of disciplines for a live meeting. The students have to opportunity to ask questions not only about the scientist's field of study, but about what it is like being a scientist. Mr. Spencer's class spoke to an entomologist studying food webs. Ms. Foley's class got to talk to an ecologist working on kelp forest habitats in southern California. Ms. Muguerza's, Ms. Elder's, and Ms. Stano's classes got to talk to a researcher studying whale and seal evolution. Each talk was a bit different as students asked their own questions which guided the discussion, but in every case we had a great time and learned so much!
Third Grade
We returned to Scratch this round in third grade and made a start on a project that will have two parts. The first part has the students selecting a 3rd grade science topic from a curated list and doing some research. They used Brain Pop and Britannica School as their main resources and took notes about their chosen topic in their journals. Once their research was complete they created a Scratch project designed to share their learning with students from a lower grade. The students learned how to add pictures to their Scratch projects and used key press events to start different parts of the program running.
In the new year, the students will create a physical display to complement the Scratch project. This will be connected to the computer with an i/o board called Makey Makey. This makes the physical display a controller for the digital presentation. The Scratch projects can be viewed in this studio. (FYI, some of the projects are still works in progress.)
Fourth Grade
The 4th grade project for this round is similar to 3rd grade's. However, the theme is biographies rather than science. The students chose an important person from a given list of artists and scientists and researched both the "when and where" of that person's life, as well as the "what they did and why it is important" part. They used a variety of resources to inform their work and, aside from some basic requirements, had free rein over the design of the Scratch project. Like 3rd grade, in a later round they will create a physical display piece that will function as an interactive controller to run the Scratch project for a visiting class of lower grade students. The work in progress Scratch biographies can be found in this studio.
Fifth Grade
This round's 5th grade project is one of my favorites, Hacking Fine Art. Students use the image editing tools in Scratch to take a famous work of art and make it interactive. They had a Google folder with several paintings to choose from, including works by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Leger, and others. The first step is to upload the painting into Scratch as the background of the project. After selecting which parts of the painting they want to make interactive, the students uploaded their chosen image, this time as a sprite, and erased all but the part intended to be clicked on. They positioned this sprite exactly over the corresponding part of the background image, hiding it in plain sight. Using the "when this sprite clicked" event, students created a wide ranging variety of highly creative effects. The full collection is in this studio. Some of the projects are from the week that 5th grade went to camp, so those are going to be a bit less complete than the other projects the studio.
