Scratch in ASPETE Patras
Scratch in ASPETE Patras, Greece
Scratch in School of Pedagogical and Technological Education (ASPETE) Patras (1-year Pedagogical Training Programme - EPPAIK)
The 1-year Pedagogical Training Programme (EPPAIK) aims at providing pedagogical background to graduates of Technical Educational Institutes and University Departments, in order to enable them to teach in Secondary Schools.
Students come from various subject areas (informatics, nurses, engineers, e.t.c.).
For the "Computer Applications in Education" course , we used Scratch for the first time during the second semester of the 2009-2010 academic year.
Students were invited to create Scratch projects in order to teach a subject of their own specialty,
with an approach similar to http://scratched.media.mit.edu/resources/scratch-plc-conversation-3-integrating-scratch-subject-areas
They were introduced in Scratch in two phases:
Phase 1. Through Logo-like activities, e.g. Turtle geometry (draw lines, squares, circles).
Phase 2. Through examples of interactive projects.
Selected examples created in Microworlds Pro by teachers and students of previous years were transcribed in Scratch:
http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/82486
Other examples came from the "Integrating Curriculum" gallery http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/11876, which is consistent with the approach we wanted to follow in this course.
Students showed high interest in designing their own interactive projects with Scratch and many interesting projects were finally created:
http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/82269/
Alimisis Dimitris, Professor, ASPETE, Head of "Educational Technology Laboratory", Patras,
Armakolas Stefanos, Technical Staff, ASPETE, Patras
Mpakopoulos Nikos, Computer Science Teacher, ASPETE, Patras
Nikolos Dimitris, Computer Science Teacher, ASPETE, Patras
During the first phase (turtle geometry) students were satisfied because they easily created the requested shapes (triangle, square e.t.c.).
As for the second phase, i think that their major concern was to think of the main idea for their project. When they came up with the idea they were eager to program it. However, in most cases, they needed a great amount of help in order to do so.
Hope this helps,
Dimitris Nikolos
Thanks for your response -- it's definitely helpful.
Thanks so much for sharing the links to the galleries. I'm always looking for examples from schools and universities for talks.
I'm curious about the two phases. Did you have any thoughts about how the students responded to the Phase 1 activities vs. the Phase 2 activities?
Thanks!
K