Interdisciplinary project between middleschool and elementary students
Contributed by
Elisabeth Lepert, March 16, 2014
I work in an international school in the Silicon Valley and I try to teach Scratch using an interdisciplinary aspect: the content of the project comes from science, math, english and french classes. This class is taught in French.
This year, students in 7th grade have learned to use Scratch since September and to introduce the concepts of variable, they had to create mathematical game: an addition game whose audience would be a first grader and a multiplication game whose audience would be a third grader.
I wanted them to understand that creating computer programming is much more that simple coding but mostly about people who will use the program. When you look on Scratch website, there are a lot of game but very often you have difficulty to understand the purpose of the game or how to play it, and when you are able to do it, you can easily see that the game is targeted to be play by the creator and not the other users of the website. I wanted to make my students sensitive to the audience targeted by their game.
When they were done with their first draft, they presented it to my colleagues of first and third grade. They started to discuss about what was good and what was not appropriate for the audience and the teachers gave them some advices to improve. The following session they modified their game using this precious feedback. Finally they went in the first and third grade class to present their games to the younger students ands make them play with it.
I created an account for my 7th graders where I upload their work. You will find for both projects the two versions of the game : the first draft and the second one after receiving feedback from 1st grade and 3rd grade teachers.
The students follow the class in French so the recording are in French but it is very easy to understand
This year, students in 7th grade have learned to use Scratch since September and to introduce the concepts of variable, they had to create mathematical game: an addition game whose audience would be a first grader and a multiplication game whose audience would be a third grader.
I wanted them to understand that creating computer programming is much more that simple coding but mostly about people who will use the program. When you look on Scratch website, there are a lot of game but very often you have difficulty to understand the purpose of the game or how to play it, and when you are able to do it, you can easily see that the game is targeted to be play by the creator and not the other users of the website. I wanted to make my students sensitive to the audience targeted by their game.
When they were done with their first draft, they presented it to my colleagues of first and third grade. They started to discuss about what was good and what was not appropriate for the audience and the teachers gave them some advices to improve. The following session they modified their game using this precious feedback. Finally they went in the first and third grade class to present their games to the younger students ands make them play with it.
I created an account for my 7th graders where I upload their work. You will find for both projects the two versions of the game : the first draft and the second one after receiving feedback from 1st grade and 3rd grade teachers.
The students follow the class in French so the recording are in French but it is very easy to understand
Comments
Lilli Meloche
Member
August 12, 2014
What a great program, thanks for sharing!
