Introducing Scratch in the 4th Grade

Last week we started an exciting unit with our fourth grade classes: Animations using Scratch.  In case you are not familiar with the application, Scratch is an application developed by MIT that can be downloaded for free in both Macs and PCs. It involves simple programming and animation commands and serves as a great preparation for our students before they start with the Lego-Mindstorm unit. The software includes the creation of “Sprites” (characters), “Costumes” (character instances), “Stages” (backgrounds), motions, sounds, looks, and more.

Since Scratch is totally new to our fourth grade students, I decided to teach them an introductory lesson totally based on exploration and discovery, giving students an opportunity to find answers for themselves and not through the teacher.

The initial instructions were:

In your dock, you can find a new application called Scratch. Try to imagine that you just received this application as a Christmas present and nobody has told you what it can do or what it is about.  You are on your own and this is your time to find out…

After exploring for about 10 minutes, the class met in front of the smartboard to share findings. Things like: creating a new sprite, drawing a new sprite, deleting a sprite, creating backgrounds, etc, kept coming up and were modeled by students who found out how to do it. Once the discussion was over, students went back to their computers trying to solve a new challenge: making the sprite advance and turn as if walking in a square. They were only allowed to talk to their neighbors in case they had any questions and could not ask the teacher. Since I believe students are open to learn from one another, I used my computer’s Remote Desktop application at different times during the session, so that students could present to the class the different solutions to the problem they were working on. Putting together everybody’s knowledge, took student learning quite far!

Tech classes, in the following weeks, will work more or less in the same way (explore-discover-share). It is amazing to witness how much kids are able to learn from their explorations, their classmates’ discoveries, and their discussions. New knowledge and skills emerge as they build up from each other’s discoveries. By the end of the initial lesson, they were already moving the “sprites” using the motion and control commands, thinking about angles, distances, and speed, and of course, adding all sorts of sounds as the sprites were moving. I have to say that the activity never asked them to add sound, but someway or another many of them found their way into music and special sound effects. It seemed that students had a need to make the animations as real as possible and adding sound really helped. I found that learning in this context happened because of the excitement they felt with their discoveries, the experience they had with the hands-on activity, and the way their thinking was pushed as they listened to their classmates’ discoveries.

Some kids went home and downloaded that same day Scratch into their computers and started emailing me all sorts of animations or games they had created. They were totally into it! Here are some examples of very basic work done by 4^th and 5^th graders using Scratch:

Walking in Squares
http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/105369

Christmas Animations
http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/105373

I’m also including some very good lesson plans I found in a wiki that belongs to Classroom 2.0:

http://wiki.classroom20.com/Scratch+Lesson+Plans

I look forward to finding creative lesson ideas from the links listed in the webpage.  If you have had any experience with Scratch in the elementary school, I would love to hear and learn from your experiences.