A STEM Camp Success Story

Hello Scratch Community!

Last summer I had the privelege of teaching a 2-day game design course to a room full of approximately 25 6th graders.  Not knowing how in the world I could possibly teach anything worth while in 2 half-day sessions, I turned to an online forum where several people recommended the Scratch programming environment.  Not only was Scratch easy for me as an instructor to pick up and learn, but the wealth of resources on the education site made it easy to find material to present to the class.  What I really wanted to avoid was spending 2 hours hunting down a missing semicolon (which is likely what would have happened if I went with a more "traditional" programming language).

As a relatively new educator in a rural community, it was a very gratifying experience to get young people excited about Computer Science through game design.  I even had students come to me saying that they didn't want to go to their next sessions so they could stay and work on their Scratch projects.  I'm very proud of my group of budding computer scientists and look forward to investigating new ways of using Scratch inside and outside the classroom!

Best,

Kevin Grems
Web Development & Design Program Coordinator/Instructor
Iowa Lakes Community College
kgrems@iowalakes.edu