Recap for Scratch Educator Meetup - Cambridge MA March 7, 2015

Our meetup space at the Kennedy-Longfellow School in Cambridge is beginning to feel like home now with its colorful round tables and surrounding makerspace assets.

Attendees:
Steven Connelly
Janet Dee
Ingrid Gustafson
Nicole Hart
Bobbi Kezirian
Lorraine Leo
Natalie Paine
Ivan Rudnicki
Adam Scharfenberger
Rosemary Slattery
Richard Smyth
Daniel Watt

Recap:
Part 1: Networking and Scheduling:
  After an informal gathering around our “food table” with coffee, juice, fruit, blueberry cake and Smartfood (delicious anytime!), we introduced ourselves and shared one challenge that we had coming up in the near future around Scratch. Ivan offered his challenge to integrate Scratch into a K-8 curriculum at three Boston charter schools and Nicole shared her challenge to use Scratch in ninth grade math class learning linear equations.  For our first session, we decided to form groups around these two very different topics.

Part 2: Collaborating and Generating Ideas
In the K-8 curriculum discussion, we brainstormed teacher PD strategies, inquiry learning strategies and workflow for elementary students.  For PD, the group recommended providing strategies for cooperative learning such as “ask 3 and then ask me,” pair programming, assigning roles to students in team projects, and gallery walks. We also talked about the need to implement grade level appropriate computational literacies which can be found in the national CSTA standards. Other resources that were suggested were: ScratchEd website, Creative Computing Curriculum, and CCOW (for PD ideas).
In the learning linear equations group, they brainstormed general math applications for Scratch with the intent to find a way to incorporate linear equations. Nicole had a specific idea which was to use the scenario of Lebron James dunking a basketball.

Part 3: Our Mini Hackathon
For the second session both groups took on the challenge of creating a Scratch project with a basketball theme to demonstrate linear equations. Janet added the challenge to use pair programming as an experience. Five teams accepted the challenge and worked for 45 minutes.
During lunch every team shared their solutions. 
Here are two solutions that were shared on Scratch:
Simple slope and intercept: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/51239584/
Slope-2: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/51238036/

Everyone agreed that the simple slope and intercept project with one sprite and 7 lines of code would be great for Nicole’s lesson (although it still needs Lebron and a hoop).
Dan also shared an example of a simple function machine in Scratch that requires the player to guess the function based on the inputs and outputs.
 
Our next meetup is scheduled for Saturday, April 4, 2015.  We want this to be a big reunion meetup so if you have joined us this year or are a veteran of MIT meetups please mark your calendar, sign up and join us at the Kennedy-Longfellow School in Cambridge.