Notes from Scratch@MIT08

Applications in Scratch

• Car race games that uses random numbers to move the cars, and calculates the speed of the car
• Virtual genie to learn about random nature of flipping a coin.
• Drawing tesselations/fractals, using the integration of rich media such as images and music
• Create you own adventure stories
• create a scratch club
• Get students to create games/activities that can be used to teach content in lower grades, e.g. geography games for teaching elementary students about the states
• Get students to create working scratch cards in Scratch that highlight one idea and add the scratch cards to a gallery, using tags to aid in searching
• Get students to plan/storyboard before creating a scratch project

Points of discussion

• Show the resources available online, scratch cards and help/examples in Scratch to students so that they can make use of the resources.
• Can integrate to other applications for example, students can create sound in Audacity or Garageband.
• Get students in technology classes to create content based projects and show teachers the presentations created so that they can get ideas of how to integrate the technology, i.e. Scratch, into their curriculum.

Points brought up for discussion/consideration

• How can we teach Scratch?
• How can we use Scratch to teach something?
• How can we learn something using Scratch?
• How can we engage students in Scratch so that they will use it in to build understanding and in the process of learning.

To check out

• http://www.glsconference.org/2008/index.html
• http://www.gameslearningsociety.org/
• http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2008/07/gls—beyond-ga.html
• http://www.academiccolab.org/home