Computer Science: Scratch, Coding, & Projects

An Introduction

In our efforts to introduce all of our students to the foundations of Computer Science we have participated in multiple “Hour of Code” sessions. These activities have served as a basis for each student gaining an understanding of how coding can be strung together to make and control things in an animated, game-like format.

We have designed small projects, using MIT’s Scratch platform, to both teach and provide an environment for them to show their mastery over more and more complex programming concepts. Scratch allows us to use the elements of coding for anything from animating a story to creating playable games to share with others. In doing so, students are able to use their own creative and expressive abilities to bring their imaginations to life in many fun but rigorous ways. The end products become instant gratification for them, but also instant proof of their individual levels of mastery over the taught concepts.

Scratch uses a structure of “building blocks” that represent the numerous commands that would be expressed through written code in other platforms or languages. This way they do not have to be bogged down with the tedious discipline of proper syntax, just to have one little error make their programs not run properly or at all. Because they use “object-oriented” representation of real code, they can assimilate to other languages later, using the same logic from their building blocks. The students have covered programming fundamentals that include queries, conditional statements (If-Then, If-Then-Else, When _ is pressed-Do), Boolean operators, Wait commands, communication blocks for sequencing events, Loops, Conditional Loops, and more.

As we are always looking for multiple ways for our children to express themselves, this is one serious way that also gives them the confidence that they can take on such daunting things like the world of Computer Science. In comparison, much of the regular education world is not being exposed to this growing field of expertise, and their students will have to desperately catch up to ours some day.

Projects completed during the 2018-2019 school year include customized video games, student name animation, story-telling, a click game, and the students animated a life goal.