Girls Who Code through YCS After School

Following the ideas and activities from the Hour of Code, this is the first year that we have gathered a group of fifteen girls to focus on the ideas of logical thinking and programming. The resource page for the class serves as starting point for the group to create, collaborate and design.

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SCRATCH for Teachers at MIT Media Lab

In the beautiful facility on the 6th floor of the glass and metal structure that house the MIT Media Lab I joined an invigorating group of 250 international educators here to learn more about using Scratch in learning settings. Over coffee I reconnected with Maureen Tumenas who always has great ideas and latest teaching explorations to share. I met a 17 year old high school student from Mexico who is a budding coder who also teaches coding to "junior school" students. We talked about the issue of encouraging more girls to explore computer science and programming and apparently in Mexico they offer a girls only option after school which I am doing for the first time this winter.

Mitch Resnick started us off with a keynote on where we've been and where we are going with Scratch. One of his key points was that the concept of learning to code is limited, but the true power is coding to learn. We teach writing as a literacy, how can we teach exploring with coding as a literacy? The 4 Ps he emphasizes are Projects-Peers-Passion-Play.

They are generous with breaks to collaborate and meet educators, so far I have met people from Mexico and Italy, as well as Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas and New Hampshire. The weather is drawing us outdoors to enjoy the Boston Skyline.

The morning session was presented by the authors of the newly released Scratch Curriculum Guide which is available from: http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/guide/. They are working on a younger learners' guide as well as a set of student pages. The title "Creative Computing" stays with the theme of the purpose of Scratch being the individual creative element supporting exploration and not just procedures. 

During the session I learned that one of the ways to have students reflect on their program is to add comment blocks into the program and that I can set up a "studio" to collect projects online.

The afternoon session focused on math concepts that can be explained by creating projects in Scratch. The presenter's resources are at http://sites.jcdsboston.org/scratchmath/. The group discussion included ideas about connecting projects to various subject areas.

"How'd you do that??

The setting: twenty-one 4th graders moving through a Scratch Curriculum that can be found on the ScratchEd community site. There are an increasing amount of resources and ideas for using Scratch in the elementary grades including Wes Fryer's Scratch materials.

The backdrop: Last December we use the Scratch online activity to make holiday cards for the Hour of Code. Middle school students came and helped 4th graders with this introduction to Scratch and coding. In May of this year we did some regrouping for math instruction and twenty-one fourth graders worked on Scratch two or three days a week.

What it sounded like: The most common thing heard in the classroom each day was, "How'd you do that?". The spirit of communication, collaboration and creative exploration vibrated throughout the room.

What it looked like: Adapting the curriculum, I created folders of handouts for students to follow. The lessons are described in this slideshow:

These photos and videos were captured with my cell phone as I was working with students so they are of limited quality, but they portray the activity and learning.

We started with the tutorial on the Scratch website as a review for everyone. Then they were charged with the task of "making something surprising" happen and share it.

Scratch learning is designed to support collaboration and students often worked in teams. With parent permission they were able to join the Scratch online community, upload their projects and view the structure of posted projects.

By the fourth class students were becoming experts at "debugging" scripts and moving on to making mazes, games and stories. At the end of each class students volunteered to share their projects and explain their learning.

This series of classes stands out for me as one of the most enjoyable, stimulating teaching experiences I've had. The students were engaged, sharing their learning and making progress from one day to the next. 

This quote from Howard Gardner was one of my inspirations for this Scratch activity:

High time for an example. We turn here to Scratch, a wonderful application created over the past two decades by Mitch Resnick, a valued colleague at MIT, and his colleagues. Building on Seymour Papert’s pioneering work with LOGO— a prototypical example of constructivist education— Scratch is a simple programming language accessible even to youngsters who have just reached school age. By piecing together forms that resemble pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, users of Scratch can create their own messages, be these stories, works of art, games, musical compositions, dances, or animated cartoons— indeed, just about any form in any kind of format. Moreover, users of Scratch can and do post their creations. Others around the world can visit these creations, react to them, build on them, and perhaps even re-create them in their own favored symbolic system. The genius of Scratch is twofold. First of all, it opens up a plethora of modes of expression, so that nearly every child can find an approach that is congenial with his or her own goals, strengths, and imaginations. Second, educational ends and priorities are not dictated from on high; rather, they can and do emerge from the child’s own explorations of the Scratch universe. In that sense, Scratch brings pleasure and comfort to those who believe in the constructivist view of knowledge. Not only are users building their own forms of meaning and constructing knowledge that they personally value, but they are epitomizing the claim of cognitivists that one learns by taking the initiative, making one’s own often instructive mistakes along the way, and then, on the basis of feedback from self and others, altering course and moving ahead.

Howard, Gardner; Katie Davis (2013-10-22). The App Generation (p. 182). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Mrs. Wolinsky, thank you for letting us explore...

This time of year I try to fit in a unit on Creativity and Design in the 4th grade classes. I started the unit last week with an exploration of Lego Digital Designer. This is the first step of unit that is about exploration, self-discovery and creating using design tools. The next couple of weeks will be spent moving on to Scratch. Some of the students have been attending an after school class through Yarmouth Community Services with a more extended time to explore this theme. The students who have been in the after school class have been a stimulant to their classmates to explore and learn during our class periods. What did I hear from a student as they filed out of the lab? "Thank you Mrs. Wolinsky for letting us explore today!"

Creativity & Design with Technology Class

We are halfway through a Community Services Class title "Creativity & Design with Technology" for 2nd, 3rd and 4th graders. This is a class I have thought about offering for a long time as a way to explore creative options using technology in a more extended format than we have time for in the school day. There was a great deal of interest in the class and the original limit was extended from 12 to 15 to the current 17 participants (12 boys and 5 girls). I am maintaining a web page of the sessions that hopefully encourages students and families to continue to explore at home.The site link is: https://sites.google.com/a/yarmouthschools.org/yestech/creativity-design
and this is the content so far:

Session 1: Download Lego Digital Designer -  PBS Kids Lab -   Session 2: Design a Comic Website -   Session 3:  Download the Skitch program (mobile app too) -  Drawing, snapshots and more. PBS Kids Lab -   Sessions 4 & 5: Download the Scratch program -    To learn more about Scratch: Cyberchase Inventor's Workshop - I came across this site which has provided resources and inspiration for this course: http://www.computersforcreativity.com. It has been very helpful to have two YHS students  help during each class session and a fourth grade student who attended Scratch camp at  MIT last summer has been a guest teacher for the last two sessions. The experiences we are having in this class will impact the "creativity & innovation" mini-units that I usually teach in the spring to all grade levels. Some other links that I hope to use for ideas to continue this into the future are: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663416/prototype-design-camp and http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/gever_tulley_s_tinkering_school_in_action.html.

Lego Digital Designer, then Scratch

Our Building Leadership Team has been reading Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind". In the book Pink talks about a cultural need for people who exercise creativity and have an interest in design as we head into a future that has many unknowns and a reality that many jobs will be outsourced or replaced by devices. In the chapter titled Design he writes,

Design--that is, utility enhanced by significance--has become an essential aptitude for personal fulfillment and professional success...as more people develop a design sensibility, we'll increasingly be able to deploy design for its ultimate purpose: changing the world. (p. 70)

With those thoughts in mind we have been spending time on technology applications that expect students to be creative, collaborative and original in their thinking. After a very brief introduction, 4th grade students used Lego Digital Designer to create models and characters. The next step was to move to MIT's Scratch program. Working in pairs the students used the "Getting Started" packet from the Learn Scratch site. It was interesting to observe the issues some had following directions carefully to learn the twelve introductory concepts. From there students are saving their individual or collaborative projects and heading in a variety of directions. For a more thorough description of teaching Scratch to students in the elementary grades I recommend Bob Sprankle's Bitbybit podcast #84.

Next week we will have a few 8th graders from our Middle School come to help the 4th grade students. Some of them have joined the MIT community of Scratch collaborators and have spent considerable time at home designing projects. It will be great to have their help and inspiration.

Scratch! (Creativity & Innovation)

This week I have been teaching 4th graders to use Scratch from the MIT Media Lab. It's GREAT! I can't remember when I've had this much fun teaching and the room has been full of kids who are empowered, active and creating. I used the videos from the Scratch site to introduce the concept of the program to the students and gave them a few starter commands from the Scratch Cards. Within twenty minutes the students were recording their own voices, "whirling" sprites, adding sound effects, creating speech clouds, and creating iinteractions between sprites. It has been fascinating to see some students focus on sounds, others on motion and others on looks and paint features. Doing this with several classes has given me the opportunity to see teachers who have supported creativity and innovation in their classroms and are cheerleaders as their students explore this entirely new realm. Where does this fit in the curriclum? To me it teaches thinking, problem-solving and feeds the "dessert brain" referenced in Edutopia magazine by Hugh Osborn.