Scratch Unplugged
Contributed by
Moti Ben-Ari, May 09, 2010
Computer Science Unplugged (see link below) is a set of activities designed to demonstrate to young people the central concepts of computer science with the use of a computer. Scratch Unplugged is a set of Scratch projects that implement the activities. The archive also contains a text file with instructions for running the programs and complete documentation.
I have not used these projects in any teaching context, but I would like to hear of your experience if you use them.
The archive is stored on Google Code to facilitate maintenance (see link below) and is distributed under the GNU GPL open-source license. Feel free to add to or modify these projects. If you would like me to include your projects in the archive, please write me.
Moti
Hi Baron,
Thank you for your interest in my work, but the I don't think that the projects are appropriate for such young kids. I developed them to see how far I (a CS professional) could push Scratch and some of the projects are quite complex. I suggest instead that you look at the projects in our textbook: Computer Science Concepts in Scratch:
http://scratched.media.mit.edu/resources/free-book-computer-science-concepts-scratch
Direct link: http://stwww.weizmann.ac.il/g-cs/scratch/scratch_en.html
But please wait a few hours as I'll be uploading an improved edition.
Moti
Hi Moti,
After playing around with one of them for a while, I came to the conclusion that you advised me on. They are good for my own learning of Scratch though :-) Also, I might expand the course later on to middle school kids where some of your samples will be more appropriate. I will look at your other resources. Thank you!
Baron
These are great projects!!! I am planning a course for the fall with 3rd, 4th and 5th graders. I will come back and take a closer look at these. Thank you for posting them!