scratchingideas

=Scratching in the Classroom. My students know the basics to Scratch ... now what?= =The benefits/Chalenges=
 * Science-- water cycle, rock formation
 * Body Systems-- how food goes through digestive track
 * Castle Projects (social studies) shared through galleries
 * E-students and climate-- create their own animal perfectly adapted to a particular climate
 * Painted the animal, made backgrounds-- animals changed color depending on temperature
 * animated thermometer which chnaged based on time of year
 * International Folk Tales or proverbs--illustrated -- ask the Scratch Kids
 * Use pen tool to create Fahrenhieit/Centigrade translation tool
 * Use Pico tool to control lego robot-- see Gheeta's puppoet show with Scratch in the bacjkgournd
 * Grades-4-6: Graphic Novels-- Collaboration between Art and Computer, stories written in class,drawn in art, "Scratched" in computer
 * Other tools to consider: Photostory, HexPaint,
 * Collaboration among kids changing roles each week to complete a project.
 * 3 students creating an activity and introduce to the class, get the students to present challenges and all create!
 * Can children create a project and collaborate with children from other countries
 * Great potential for remixing-- each project is added on (also see IEarn.org)
 * Shouldn't be used for everything-- but is a wonderful communication too using photos and interactivity
 * Ease of use to upload to great advantage
 * Kids can work from home-- don't need "Inspiration!"
 * Use Scratch Community as data points-- ie, gather data from comment sections and report results in Scratch
 * Ways of children to gather and report on data within the community
 * 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 them to a gallery, using tags to aid in searching
 * Get students to plan/storyboard before creating a scratch project
 * Get ideas for using Scratch in Maths from the scratch galleries.
 * Three ways scratch can be used. Teaching tool to develop problem-solving and programming skills. New medium for kids to do projects (as opposed to a paper, a PowerPoint, a poster...). A tool for teachers: they can create supporting materials for their curriculum and their teaching. Are there other lenses through which we can view this tool?


 * 1:1 computing. Scratch is an authoring environment. It is more engaging than putting together a PowerPoint.
 * 1) Sticking point: trying to shove Scratch into a traditional classroom/educational model. How do we convince the English teacher that kids should spend valuable class time engaged in coding? How do we show the benefit to the classroom teacher of using Scratch?
 * 2) Scratch can bring the teacher into much closer contact to students, reduce the burden of explaining things by allowing kids to explore and teach each other.
 * 3) Visibility in the community (presenting their work on the web and before a live audience) is very crucial. Sharing things makes them live longer than the creation-to-grade lifespan.
 * 4) Must Scratch basics be taught before students can be given more open-ended assignments coupled with subjects such as math, history, etc.?
 * 5) Can we break down some of the barriers between subject areas?
 * 6) Can/should we document/illustrate connections between Scratch and other disciplines (such as math concepts with cartesian coords, sin/cos/tan; or storytelling structure with English)? What applications of Scratch cut across disciplines (such as presentation)?