CIC: Semester 1, Week 3: Teaching novices to program in Scratch

The purpose of the activity is to learn the educational design principles behind the visual programming language Scratch.

1. Read this article. Note: you can find this and all the other articles for this course using the link to the Resource List. 
2. Install Scratch 2 and 3 on your computer (the same one you will use for the online class).
3. Create a program in Scratch. You can follow a tutorial (Such as https://creativecomputing.gse.harvard.edu/guide/) or just play with it. Be prepared to show your program in the class on Thursday. It doesn’t have to be fancy!
4. Explore the Scratch programs written by children. You can download them here. These programs were made by P7 (i.e. 11 year old) children in one hour. They could choose to create any program that they wanted. They had been learning Scratch for at least 6 weeks. 
   a.    Pick two of the games, run them and read the code
   b.    Decide what advice you would give the learners about what they should do next. You should structure the feedback as “Two stars and a wish”. The “stars” refer to positive aspects of the learner’s work, and the “wish” refers to an improvement which would help them to learn. Bring a copy of your feedback to the online class.
5. Write a discussion post about your experiences with Scratch. Write about the first programming language you learned. How does it compare for being accessible to novices and powerful for experts? Scratch was designed to have:
   a.    Low floor
   b.    High ceiling
   c.    Wide walls
   To what extent do you think it meets these design goals?

6. Read and comment on discussion posts of other classmates. 

    

   Class slides