A TeachNetUK Project: 6 Lessons on Getting Started with Scratch
This site lays out a framework for six lessons that introduce Scratch. The lessons were originally intended for high school students in the U.K., but they could easily be adapted for younger or older students. The website also provides worksheets and PowerPoint presentations that accompany the lessons. The high-level overview of the main Scratch interface may be especially useful to beginners. Relevant U.K. curriculum standards are cited.
Here's the lesson scheme from the website:
Lesson 1
Introduction to Scratch using introductory video from Scratch website and PowerPoint on the areas of the scratch interface. Students have time to investigate existing scratch projects either online or provided by the teacher in order to get some idea of the way that Scratch can be used.
Students open up Scratch and create a program for moving a sprite across the screen. Students continue with more advanced examples of movement and experiment with more complex movement and repeating events such as using the forever instruction to faciltate contunous movement of a sprite
Students experiement with costumes in order to animate the sprite as it moves around the screen into a walking motion and experient with keyboard control of the sprite. Some students will be able to combine the animation and keyboard control scripts into a single script where they can make the sprite walk around the screen using the keyboard.
Lesson 3
Students make an animated clock using an imported background
Lesson 4
Students experiment with interactivity between objects using the sensing instructions so that sprites interact with each other on screen. Students introduce backgrounds and sounds into their animations.
Lesson 5
Drawing lines - Scratch can perform all of the functions of far simpler programs such as logo - using the pen up and pen down functions students can explore simple patterns and relationships per the requirements of the National Curriculum
Lesson 6
Students start to declare variables and insert timers and other numerical and boolean instructions in their animations. Students start to design games with give feedback for the end user and publish these games online.
[Bonus] Lesson 7
Students further investigate games created by others and download scripts and investigate these in order to broaden their understanding of how the scripting can be used in a variety of contexts
See attached for a sample ppt presentation (1IntroducingScratch.ppt) and a worksheet (CatWalk.doc).
