Hello! Welcome back Educators! This week's blog I will be sharing with you a new classroom tool that your students will love. It's a program called Scratch, a “programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, games, and animations.” When navigating through the website I took away three new insights that I found interesting. My first insight is when I was creating my first “scratch” the structure was well organized and easy for students/educators to follow. The organiztion is set up in different colors. For example; the color blue indicates motion, sound is the color pink and for control is orange. Students can freely move the codes anywhere on the blank space. Throughout this process students will strengthen their computational thinking because they have to figure x and y axis on how they want their figure to move. Another insight about scratch is a great program for all student levels, both beginner and advanced. As students are in the process of developing their own scratch at certain points students will ask questions or ask for assistance to figure out a motion or how to use a certin code. Students will be able to solve problems when they encounter challenging coding. Lastly, “scratch” is a very useful tool that teachers can incorporate into any subject area to engage students in learning. Therefore, this program has familiar features to “Hour code” focused on students gaining computational thinking and problem solving skills. This program has a game-like structure which will be very eye catching for students to interact with. I enjoyed making my own “scratch” project. I was very intrigued by all the codes I was able to add like sound,motions, and sensing. Scratch had my creativity flowing because I wanted to apply all the features to my character.
Role In Elementary School
I think the role of programming in elementary school classrooms is for students to be creative beyond pencil and paper. Students at his age learn by playing and scratch does a good job for students to learn but at the same time gaining technical skills. Based on scratch objectives is “students can use scratch to code their own interactive stories, animations, and games…[and] learn to think creatively, reason systematically and work collaboratively” (“Eduactors”). These skills are important for students to gain at an early age so they expand their knowledge throughout their educational careers.