Scratch

The children in First and Second class enjoyed coding with Scratch this week.

Scratch is an excellent, engaging and fun environment for learning some fairly advanced mathematical concepts and the basics of computer science too. Scratch is deceptively simple with its palette of brightly coloured blocks. The thing about Scratch programming though is that you can do amazing things when you combine the blocks in interesting ways. As children progress they are able to use Scratch in more and more advanced ways. Scratch has a low floor, but a high ceiling.

Scratch programming allows children to use computers to express their creative ideas and solve practical problems and empowers children to be digital makers not just digital users. Scratch is free to download here https://scratch.mit.edu/download

Collaborating on Scratch

Scratch has become one of our favourite lessons at Togher National School. Scratch helps the children develop many numeracy skills in an exciting and enjoyable way.  One of the main features of the lesson is the collaboration between the children – look at the pictures below and imagine the conversations. “How did you do that?” “How do I fix this?” “Look at this” “If you change that around it might work” “you need to put in a decimal point there”. All the children are engaged with their learning and collaborating with each other.

Scratch programming

The children in 3rd and 4th classes have been busy creating their first Scratch script. This simple script involved an animated Smiley Face that blinks and then smiles. Have a quick look at the finished animation before we share the Scratch block programming.

This animation involves just four pictures.

To create this animation the children first had to create the Smiley Face character or “sprite”. Scratch has a Draw Sprite option which is very user friendly and quite similiar to MS Paint.

 

The children next duplicated the Smiley Face sprite and then edited the eyes to create the blink costume.

Another duplication of the Smiley Face was edited to create the start of a smile costume.

Another duplication of the Smiley Face was edited to create a full smile costume.

Next the children used Scratch blocks to create the code. Blocks are puzzle-piece shapes that connect to each other vertically like a jigsaw puzzle.

The Green Flag block starts the script.

The switch costume block is used to change the appearance of the sprite.

The wait block controls the length of time that each costume appears.

The finished script for our short animation.

Scratch is free to download. The Scratch Offline Editor can be downloaded here.

https://uploads.scratch.mit.edu/scratch2download/