Scratch Club
I have a 6-week course on teaching children software programming, that you,
are welcome to use in your own course. It includes a presentation (in
OpenOffice format) as well as some Zip file of supporting material.
I also try to show the students what is possible by beginning with one of
my own projects.
You can see the end results of these lessons on my Scratch project page.
Lesson 1 - Introduction
This is essentially similar to the Getting Started guide that comes with Scratch.
However, I teach them a bit about turtle graphics as well.
Lesson 2 - Music
This lesson uses Scratch's ability to play music and drum sounds to
sneakily teach them about concurrency and the issues surrounding it.
The supporting material contains a lot of sheet music (which I print out),
and piano keyboard-to-musical notes sheet.
Lesson 3 - Graphics
This lesson first begins with a discussion of pixels and how to make artwork.
It then goes over animation and coordinate geometry (in order to show them
how to move their artwork.
Lesson 4 - Messages
This lesson teaches the children event processing and synchronization issues.
Message passing is a critical part in Scratch, but it is pretty simple to use.
The supporting material includes the beginning for "joke" movie.
I usually walk the students through creating a knock-knock joke or
riddle joke by synchronizing
a dialog between 2 sprites.
Lesson 5 - Variables
This lessons teaches the children about variables, holding states, and doing
math and conditions.
The supporting materials include the beginning of a game, a Pokemon Battle
(who knew it came back to be popular again).
Lesson 6 - Sensors and Games
I usually like to end the course by letting the children show-off their
projects. Before this, however, I step them through building a simple,
trademark-free version of Mario Brothers. In the process, I show them
how to use Scratch's sensors for sprite collision detection.
Lesson 0 - Care of a Thumbdrive
I have a small budget from my school that I use to purchase cheap USB keys,
which I pre-install Scratch (for both Mac and Windows) as well as the supporting
material for the lessons.
I have a presentation on what a thumbdrive is and how to care for it.
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