This is old news to most people who are on the tech side of a school, but I wanted to share my approach this year in teaching Scratch. I have only had the opportunity to teach Scratch as an after-school activity. I will be introducing it to my 5th grade class during our teacher-run ICT time. This will be interesting as 1/3rd of the class is in my after-school activity and will be far ahead of everyone else. I've given myself a differentiation challenge.
Lesson 1: I introduced the program. A few kids had seen it the year before but had no real grasp of anything beyond simple animation that relied solely on costume changes. So, we played games and kids explored the interface.
Lessons 2-4: I introduced a few of the basic commands at the start of each lesson and then let the kids experiment. They were running into a lot of problems and not knowing where to look for solutions. On top of this, everyone was working on their own project.
Lesson 5: I changed direction and we worked as a group. First, I wrote this tag game. I left a few simple bugs in it, ones that dealt with the order of commands or a few small missing blocks. I gave the class 3 things to fix and sent them off to work together. With some guidance, all the bugs were solved and this is the improved version that two of the girls came up with.
Here are the bugs I left in a very basic tag game:
1. The sprites could move during the introduction countdown.
2. If the second sprite did not move, it could not be tagged.
3. When the game was over, it did not reset automatically.
As you can see, these were fixed. The students gained a better understanding of both the details that are needed for a good project and how to read through their code and find issues.
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