Well, rather than complete a Scratch tutorial as outlined in this assignment, I thought I might upload a Scratch tutorial that I created for my students after scratch updated to Scratch 3.0. This was based on an apple catch game that used to be on the tutorial site, but it wasn't included in the new tutorials so I rebuilt the tutorial step-by-step. Feel free to use this tutorial if you'd like! It can be found for public viewing at https://bit.ly/scratchcatch
I'm going to be honest here, and say that I have very little criticism of the Scratch platform. It's free to use, requires no personal information from the students, is full of resources for learners and educators, can be used on any platform (now that they've migrated from Flash to HTML5), has hundreds of language options and has integration potential with physical components like Microbits and other plug ins.
I think that getting students to go into the different projects already available on the site and have them "pop the hood" to see how everything works is such a fantastic feature. You really get a chance to see how amazingly creative and sophisticated people get with their code when you realize that they're designing functions and algorithms inside the block-based coding platform.
I love Scratch! I'll always use it in my teaching. The (non-Scratch) tutorials available at CODE.ORG provide a curated block-based coding tutorial and I find that the 20-hour introductory course gives a lot of the background needed to get up and running with higher-level thinking projects in Scratch. I regularly encounter students who claim to hate technology or coding (before they get building in Scratch) have a complete change of heart by the end of this unit.
Response from Jessica.
Thanks for sharing the tutorial! I very much agree with your assessment of Scratch. It's a great program and I will continue to use it with my class. I also like that so many other educators use the program so there is no shortage of ideas and resources!
Karen-
Hi I agree so much that scratch is an excellent program. For a grade 2 class last year I was able to print out loads of task cards and the students loved working through each one. The collaboration in the class, where there was usually anger between some students, was amazing.
Kim's response - thank you for providing this awesome tutorial. I know it probably took some time for you to create it. I laughed when I read the part about creating an evil sprite to take points away - genius! I am also a Scratch lover and have used it to promote Scratchathons in grade 6 classes. I'm thinking about ways to adapt this project to create a fruit slicing game using Makey Makeys and tinfoil swords.
Which grade(s) do you teach?