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...

Interview with student 'T' about the process of making a game on Scratch: The challenge was I had the whole theme and how I was going to make the game in my head, but the problem was I didn't know how to make "lives."  So I tried a few games on Scratch until I found one I liked and went onto 'remix.'  And then found out how they did lives.  I found out they made lives as a variable and then I had lives, but the only problem was, it kept going after 'death' so I had to look at the game a little bit more that I had gotten lives off and then I found one thing that I was missing. (what was missing?) I forgot to put in one block that when lives went to 'zero' I forgot to put in the block 'stop all.' I also had a thing that when lives reached 'zero' I had it go to a different background and that was the background I labeled 'destroy' because that is when the spaceship is dead.  I went on and it was done.  I went on to its ...

Started Scratching with my 3/4 graders following the creative computing curriculum from MIT media lab and the design-based learning approach.  Students are creating an e-design notebook to document their experience along the way.  First session was viewing the intro video and then discussing what makes Scratch different from other computer experiences - play vs. create etc. Next session was students brainstorming three things they could show about themselves in an "All About Me" Scratch project - photos, videos, sprites, change background Students are also using Scratch for science (zoogle) project and in ELA by using it to show an example of figurative language (idiom, pun, etc) Quotable quotes: H: (when about to show me his Scratch) - I didn't really test this one... A: (in the background) Then it's not going to work if you didn't test it... Mrs. M:  What makes you say it's not going to work if you don't test? A:  Because you have do some, then test or e...