Information Technology Education

We started this week on debugging projects in Scratch where the students had to 'fix' a program in order for it to work properly.  For example, one such project involved making the Scratch cat say meow three times with a speech bubble appearing at the same time rather than the speech bubble and meows being off-synch.  Students are now working on creating their own debug-it projects and adding them to our class studio.  Lots of valuable collaborative skills at work in this process as well with feedback and suggestions, input and revisions. Here are some student comments about their debugging experiences: "Debugging is really fun because you get to try to find out what problems other people had with their programs and to fix it.  Finding out the right block to put in and use is challenging because there are a lot of blocks to choose from and you have to choose one of them.  Some are easier than others.  Some you just have to remove or put in one or two blocks...

Mini Scratch Projects 3rd Grader - Idiom in 'Scratch' - "Hold your horses!" 3rd grader - Idiom - "I'm going to blow your socks off!" 3rd grader - "All About Me" project

Here is a collection of student journal reflections connecting the Common Core Standards for Mathematical Practice and binary numbers and the Cartesian coordinate system. The eight mathematical practices: 1)  Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. 2)  Reason abstractly and quantitatively. 3) Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others. 4)  Model with mathematics. 5)  Use appropriate tools strategically. 6)  Attend to precision. 7)  Look for and make use of structure. 8)  Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning. 3rd grader: "In binary numbers, I use math practice number 6 when doing code.  Binary numbers are the digits 0 and 1.  Code for binary numbers is doubling one number starting with one and writing them in 0 or 1.  You see, trying binary numbers with cards make it easier.  We did it in class once.  First, our teacher made us cards that say 1,2,4,8, and 16.  Cards that a...

Interviewing a student about looping: H:  When I started my game called Lizard Jump, I had 6 levels that I wanted to put into the game. The game was working fine, but I received people saying, "This game has 6 levels.  Where are the other five?" So I put out the statement that I was going to try to get all 6 levels working.  I looked at the other 5 levels and saw that there was no loop connecting them.  So I went to 'make a block' named it 'loop' put it down and made a variable.  And I called that variable 'loophole.'  I put the titles of the games, Lizard Jump, 2,3,4,5,6, and put them in the variables section.  Then I put those in the 'define loop' block. Then went over to the other games, made the same block over and over again, then tested the game.  I also put in 'when space key pressed,' define the loop and do what the loop block says to do.  So then I tested the game by pressing the space key and the lizard said 'welcome to le...

Interview with novice 'Scratcher' - M: On Scratch I am working on an idiom project - a taste of your medicine.  It was pretty challenging because most of the sprites they had was not what I needed so I had to create my own and my own background and fix things up and reprogram it to make it better.  I had to make my mad scientist disappear.  When I was trying to do that I tried to make my own block and typed in disappear, but when I clicked on that for my mad scientist, he just stayed there.  And so then I had to make him move 240 steps so you didn't see him anymore, but you could still see his hand.  I'm trying to make him disappear, but it's hard because I tried to get the background to go over him, but that didn't work either.  Whenever I played my whole video I would have to set everything up over again, and that was annoying because I had to move everything here and move it back there.  I'm looking around Scratch to see how I can program to set its...