December 2007 — News
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Coding (and Consulting) Kid-style with Scratch
Elementary students program in Scratch to develop applications for special needs class
In the past, Karen Randall's classes at schools in St. Paul, MN have performed service projects that consisted of organizing a blood drive, selling toys to raise money for tsunami victims, and creating a brochure for a non-profit neighborhood organization.
This year, her 5th and 6th grade class at Expo Elementary School are lending their consulting and programming services to the students at another school. The programming is being done in Scratch, a language developed and made freely available online by the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at MIT Media Lab.
The idea behind Scratch is to help young people learn mathematical and computational ideas as well as the process of design. A paper about the language, "Learning with Scratch, 21st Century Learning Skills," cites three broad areas in which Scratch can develop skills: information and communication, thinking and problem-solving, and interpersonal and self-direction. Currently, about 45,000 people have registered on the Scratch Web site, which offers the program for download, examples, tutorials, and discussion forums, including one specifically for educators.
The Scratch user interface
The project Randall has instigated paired small teams of students from Expo with individual five- and six-year-olds from Bridge View School--in the same school district--with severe language and movement disabilities. The Expo students performed in-person interviews with the Bridge View students and helpers to learn about their capabilities and interests.
That meeting posed a challenge for some of the Expo students. "It was sort of awkward, because you didn't really know how to interact with them," said Natalie, one of Randall's students. "Then after a while you got more comfortable toward them."
The Expo students received e-mails from the teacher ahead of time about each child and prepared questions to be answered during the initial meeting. They wrote notes during the interview and used the data they gathered to come up with ideas for games that the Bridge View students could play. Next, they wrote out the plans for their programs.
One difference in this programming job was that the students were limited to creating programs that could be directed by special switches, such as those created by Ablenet, on sensor boards, since the users are unable to use a standard keyboard or mouse. As described by Leah, another student in Randall's class, a switch is "a pad with one button. They call them jellybeans. There are big ones, called Big Reds. [The users] click on what they need."
