My First Scratch Class

At the end of last year (2009) we, as in parents, were told that our children entering the fourth or fifth grade were going to need laptops.  So, we purchased, like everyone else, the laptop the school was offering (an Acer Aspire One, linked below).  At about the same time, quite by accident, I discovered the Scratch programming environment.  After a bit of playing around myself, I got my eldest son (soon to be eight) using it at home.  He seemed to really enjoy it and so I booked an appointment with the school's Principal and went to give a demonstration.  I took along print outs of some of the briefs on the Scratch website.  Turns out I didn't even need them.  The Principal got excited the moment I showed him the small demonstration programme.  So, we agreed to start something the next school year (2010) and now we're here.

A couple Tuesdays ago I ran the introduction/demonstration class where I asked all interested children, with laptops, to turn up and see if they were interested in coming back for proper lessons.  I opened by showing my simple Invaders game and to make it even better, I played it with a Logitech joypad (using JoyTail).  I gave a quick demonstration and talk about the LEGO brick coding and talked about using the the webcam, microphone and paint picture editor for creating sounds and sprites.  I then opened the floor up for questions.  There were certainly plenty.  I expected to get my son and a few of his friends.  Instead I got more than 30 kids and every one of them wanted to know something about Scratch.  There weren't even enough desks in the classroom!  So, after such a great response it was decided to start the real class the following Tuesday.

Last Tuesday was the first "official" lesson.  I was surprised to see about 30 kids in the class again, with a whole bunch on the floor again.  There just isn't enough room for the interest.  So, I ran my class following the outline in the attached PDF, Scratch Lesson 1: Welcome to Scratch.  I took it slowly and stepped through each part of the script which built from simply saying "Hello, world" all the way to asking a question and building a response.  The most important thing I was trying to convey in this lesson was to start small and simple and build to get bigger and more complex, a concept I think Scratch makes easy to visualise.  It is too easy to make simple, hard to find errors when you jump in at the deep end and try to do everything at once.

It is also important to me that the kids have something to show at the end.  Something that actually does something useful and/or fun.  While the end of the first class might not have seen the kids with their own Space Invaders, it did do something fun with the tools they had been taught.  As we progress and the children get used to working with Scratch the end project will become more entertaining.  Each child also received a printed copy of the PDF so they could reference it later when messing around in their free time or at home.  I found later from some parents that their children found the handouts very helpful when working on their own at home.

Lastly, I try to introduce real terms into each class that relate to the work at hand.  I think that this will set them up to easily understand learning about other languages through classes and textbooks should they eventually head down that road.

Overall the class went quite well.  The kids were quite hyped up as they are very excited about Scratch and some were expecting to write a game that moment.  However, this is all to be expected.  I remember when I first wanted to play guitar.  I expected to play it the moment I picked it up.  It was the same for me when I started getting interested in computers.

I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's lesson.  We will be working with a Magic 8 Ball programme to learn about random numbers, variables and lists.  I will post that and all following classes here also, as time permits.