Scratch
Last year I started teaching programming to my grade 10 classes. I started with Python, which is easy to understand, forces good programming practices, and is one of my favorite languages. It was a complete disaster. I had four or five in each class who understood what I was doing, and the rest were completely lost, which says a whole lot about my teaching. At DevConf.cz 2014, I chatted with Matthew Miller about my Python problem, and he suggested teaching my students Scratch.
For those (like me) that don’t know about it, Scratch is a graphical programming language that’s designed to be easy to use while still allowing the full power of a proper programming language. The benefit of teaching programming using Scratch is that the students get quick graphical feedback on what works and what doesn’t, and syntax errors are pretty much impossible. Once they understand the basic concepts of programming, it’s then easier to switch to something like Python.
I switched to Scratch, and the students loved it. (Or, at the very least, liked it better than Python.) I ended the school year with a group assignment that was partially graded based on votes by the rest of the classes. I had great ideas for making the group assignments available online, but never went anywhere with it. Fast-forward to this year where we’ve started with Scratch and are now almost done with it and ready to move on to Python. And, since I now have a deadline, I’ve put together a simple site so they can vote on each others’ group projects.
At the moment, it has last year’s projects and is open for anyone to rate, so if you want to try out their projects, go to https://scratch.lesbg.com, give them a shot, and rate them. This was a first attempt for both students and myself, so please be gentle on the ratings.
Sometime in the next few weeks I’ll post this year’s projects. They will be available to play, but initially only students or teachers in the school will be able to rate them. Once I’ve scored them, I’ll open up the ratings to everybody.
If you have any comments or suggestions for the site itself, please leave them below.
The Cedar and the Thistle 