Ideas for implementing a Scratch competition in a school or after-school setting
(Retrieved from Scratch Forums)
Have contestants divided in teams. Propose a project no one has ever done in Scratch and ask the different teams to implement it.
At the end, all of them will have different solutions for the same problem which all of them could learn from.
In some ways, that's how a group of people implemented the first Tetris in Scratch. All of them had a clear idea of what the challenge was going to be, but no one knew if it was going to be possible to implement it. Different people contributed different parts of the project.
It ends up being like in the real world where people have to solve a problem no one else has solved before which I think is quite rewarding.
The challenge could be defined by the interests of your participants. If they are into video games, you could figure out what is their favorite video game and ask them to implement it in Scratch, or perhaps combine different features of different video games. If people are more into art you could challenge them to combine different artistic mediums into making a piece of electronic art that expresses X or Y.
Ashley
I agree with the competition element. We have just / are just starting a new unit based on scratch for our Yr 8 students (UK secondary - 12 - 13 yr olds). The task to design a pacman game and hopefully for some of the more able to take to scratch and produce independent projects as well.
I had my first lesson yesterday and introduced the task with links to WRL (work related learning, industrial competition, research and development, industrial espionage, blue sky thinking) suddenly a new open task emerged with competition and earnest discussion amongst a class who have in previous guises not been stretched enough.
We are linking scratch to the national curriculum using the materials posted on Teach-ict.com where we have a department subscription - at last ict in our school is moving into a more exciting age. I am currently teaching myself and testing some lego mindstorms kit for another new unit to involve pupils in programming and linking ict's use to the real world in a fun way.