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Summary of Scratch in Informal Educational Settings

Key aspects of teaching and learning Scratch in informal educational settings
Hello everyone! I am a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education developing what I call a "Minute of Code" Scratch activity. There are many wonderful workshops and outlines that delineate how to teach Scratch over the course of an hour, a day, or a week. But what if we don't have an entire hour available? I work at a museum where my interactions with visitors are usually on the time scale of minutes, and I am interested in creating a much shorter facilitated activity that teaches visitors about Scratch and still leads to a meaningful learning experience.

In developing my activity, I have collected examples of Scratch being used in informal settings, including museums and libraries. I hoped to understand the key aspects of Scratch workshops and how I could transfer these aspects to a shorter Scratch activity. I organized my findings into an Excel spreadsheet with information on each example and any ideas that I thought I could transfer to my activity. I am attaching the spreadsheet below, along with a document summarizing the key aspects of Scratch workshops from my search. I hope this can be used as resource for others. I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions, and I will be posting further details on my activity in the near future. Thank you!


Comments
Chris Gresse von Wangenheim
Member
Hello Adrian,

we just presented SCRATCH/BYOB at a science fair in an informal way with visitors stopping by only for a short time (typically about 3-10 minutes). We did this by a) enabling them to make very simple SCRATCH programs on a large touchscreen monitor and b) by having them program SCRATCHIE's car (controled via an Arduino) by using pre-defined blocks in BYOB to make the car drive forward/backwards/left/right. This was a huge success! Have a look also on our report http://scratched.media.mit.edu/stories/robo-scratch-2013-science-fair-federal-university-santa-catarinabrazil.