Creative Computing and Scratch
Dylan Ryder, The School at Columbia University
@DylanMRyder
http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/guide/
Free guide – a Harvard publication about an MIT product. 🙂
Creative computing is about
- creativity
- empowerment/agency
- computing
Scratch launched in May 2007. 6 million projects.
Creative Computing provides Lesson Guides along with handouts to kids. The course is based on a constructionist approach. Core computing concepts are addressed explicitly.
Principles
- Cheating (!)
- Personalising /ownership
- Sharing, authentic audiences
- Reflectng
The guide is good for teachers, parents, librarians, after school facilitators, etc
What you need to implement:
- computer with speakers
- network
- Projector/IWB
- Design notebooks (free from project)
http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu
Concepts
- sequence
- loops
- parallelism
- events
- conditionals
- operators
- data
Low floor, high ceiling – easy to start, yet capable of quite significant programming tasks.
Computational practices
- Experimenting and iterating
- ?
- ?
Computational perspectives
- express
- connect
- questioning
Aligned to Common Core standards. Pretty straightforward to map most of this to the draft Australian Curriculum Digital Technologies.
Specific considerations for DoE Tasmania
The availability of free and educator-developer resources makes this a very compelling way to introduce Scratch, which itself is a programming environment well-suited to primary and junior high school.