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Blocks

Contributed by Karen Brennan, July 20, 2009
Images of Scratch blocks that can be printed out as manipulatives
  • Original Author: Karen Brennan
  • Education Level: Preschool and Kindergarten, Elementary School, Middle School, High School, College and University, Professional Development, Other
  • Content Types: Activity, Handout, Reference Guide
  • Curricular Areas: Computer Science, Engineering, Language Arts, Mathematics, Music, Science, Social Studies, Teacher Education, Technology, Visual Arts, Other
  • Keywords: events, parallelism, manipulatives, CS4HS, Creative Computing

During a workshop last week, we introduced the concepts of parallelism (doing stuff at the same time) and events (letting things know that it's time to do stuff) by "programming" people using print-outs of Scratch blocks.

One person described each task in the activity, another person specified the program for each task, another person taped the blocks of the program to the wall, and a couple of volunteers acted out the programs. The activity tasks were:

  • one person doing one task (like walking), then introducing the notion of resetting
  • one person doing two tasks (like walking and talking)
  • a second person simultaneously doing a task (like talking)
  • the second person doing a dependent task (like talking after the first person)

I'm attaching the blocks as jpgs and pdfs.

Resource Files
Images: 
broadcast
forever
go to x, y
move
wait
point in direction
repeat
say
turn counter-clockwise
turn clockwise
when green flag clicked
when I receive
when sprite clicked
Other Files: 
application/zip iconblocks-jpg.zip
application/zip iconblocks-pdf.zip
Comments
Pratibha Srinivasan
Member
February 07, 2010

 Great idea.  I have done a variation of this where I printed out images, cut them out and glued them to popsicle sticks. This made it very easy for kids to use as  puzzle pieces.