December 2007 — News
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Coding (and Consulting) Kid-style with Scratch
That posed another challenge for Randall's students. "We're finding out it's really hard to do programming when you have one switch that has to do everything," said Randall. "There's only one key because that's the only thing the kid knows how to push.... If you push this button, then this part of the story happens. If you push the button again, another part of the story happens.... We're learning about variables really fast."
For the last phase, wrote Randall in a proposal about the project, "The students will write a 'final reflection,' stating what they learned about programming, design, and interacting with children who have disabilities."
Randall, who isn't a technology-specific teacher, has been having her students use Scratch since its beta launch after learning about it at the Science Museum of Minnesota in 2003. She's also introduced it to her home room class as well.
Programming with Scratch
According to an MIT news release, the name Scratch comes from the technique used by hip-hop disc jockeys, who spin vinyl records to mix music clips together in creative ways. When programming with Scratch, kids can mix together graphics, photos, music, and sounds.
Programming in Scratch consists of dragging and dropping graphical command blocks onto a Scripts work area. The program starts with a single "sprite," a cat character that can be manipulated by the command blocks. For example, to add sound, the student drags a "play sound" block from the Sound menu into the work area and specifies through a drop-down menu which sound to play--a meow or pop or something specially recorded. To change the cat's appearance, the student pulls up the Looks menu and chooses a command such as "Change color...." By plugging the two blocks together, the cat will play a sound and change color.
To stop and start a script, the user clicks a green flag and red stop sign button. He or she can also create sprites or choose sprites from a folder, then modify their appearance, animate them, add music or other sounds, and make them bend, twist, disappear, and reappear. The Scratch Web site includes galleries where kids can post their projects for sharing.
To introduce Scratch early on, Randall had her students create two sprites that said something to each other using the Say command. "I made a creation story about how the world began," said Natalie. Kate, another student, said she created a program in which one tiger ran "and another tiger joined him and they talked to each other."
Now, said Randall, the students with Scratch experience teach those who are new to it. Those who express little interest in it early on tend to become so enamored, they want to learn more about programming--especially the girls. "It's interesting," she said, "that girls are liking to do computer programming, which is something that [some experts] say girls don't like to do."
