May 2015 Cambridge Scratch Educator Meetup

May 2015 Cambridge Scratch Educator Meetup

Attendees:

Andrea Blake and family
Steven Connelly
Janet Dee
Jing Ding
Ingrid Gustafson
Kelly Fischer
Brittany Haehlen
Michael McLaughlin
Colin Meltzer
Ivan Rudnicki
Alina Spaulding
Sandra Thaxter
Gayla Webb

Recap:

Part 1: Scratch Day kickoff:

To kick off the May meetup at the Kennedy-Longfellow School in Cambridge we streamed the opening ceremonies for Scratch Day 2015 from the MIT Media Lab.   This gave us a chance for everyone to have a little breakfast and start networking.  Instantly, people were sharing ideas and exploring the many resources in the room.  As we had many new faces, we paused the conversations and introduced ourselves, sharing what brought us to this meetup.  

Part 2: Play Time:

As a group we decided to continue the conversations and explorations that people had already started. Janet and Mike worked on strategies for learning Scratch in order to teach it to HS students. Steve tried the 12 block challenge from the Scratch Day agenda and then worked on a maze with Michael and Ivan. They had a great discussion around ways to keep sprites from going through maze walls. Alina shared the ECS curriculum and some starter projects with Andrea and Jing.  Andrea’s sons built with the Little Bits blocks, inspiring Colin and Sandra to try out the Scratch Extension for Little Bits after a discussion on FabLabs. Andrea and Ingrid talked about the Creative Computing Curriculum Guide, the local chapter of the CSTA as a resource for getting involved with computer science education, as well as the Raspberry Pi and how it can be used in a variety of settings to help learn computer programming.

Part 3: Lunch and Sharing:

At lunch we were joined by representatives of the Kentucky Meetup team: Kelly, Brittany and Gayla. They came over from the MIT Scratch Day event to visit us. Then Andrea’s sons demonstrated the elaborate Little Bits chain they had built in two hours.  We were all impressed with how much they had learned since they had never seen the Little Bits before.  Janet shared CyberParra’s hunt game as an example of lists and Ivan suggested using the same strategy to make a Snake game.  Andrea’s 12 year old son shared his Scratch maze that he had made for a class project.

Snif Snif, Hound will find you by CyberParra: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/55222314/

Bee-Bot Simulator by Ivan: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/61353618/

Our next meetup is scheduled for Saturday, June 6, 2015.  This will be our last meetup for this school year so please mark your calendar, sign up and join us at the Kennedy-Longfellow School in Cambridge.