Chapter 18: Learning to Code in Scratch - Part 1
Date: 25th June 2024 - Tuesday 1:32 pm & 2:45 pm
This is yet another interesting post about teaching coding skills to the amazing learners at the Ranaa Child Welfare Foundation, which is a school for street children in Peshawar. They are doing an awesome job trying to provide quality education experiences to under privileged children in the society. I am honoured to play a small yet pivotal role in contributing in positive ways. This post will reflect on todays learning experience in Scratch. Scratch is available online and anyone can start creating in Scratch within seconds.
I had started teaching coding skills to learners some two weeks back in Turtle Academy which is important because it teaches learners the very basic skills in coding. We spent some time practicing coding in Turtle Academy and I wanted to revise today but somehow the link was down and neither the learners nor I could work on Turtle Academy. I had already planned a task in Scratch for the learners. I guess it is interesting because it lets the learners see the code in action visually, they can see their characters moving on screen and performing different actions. They can add sound to their characters and bring them to life.
The interface of Scratch is pretty easy to understand. It is colorful and not distractive to the eyes. There are tutorials for students and teachers. They can watch the tutorials and program themselves too. They can save the programs too. There is a huge library of sprites and the learners could actually select any of the sprites to start coding. They can change the backgrounds which could be very useful for creating animated stories. There is a sound gallery also and students can add any sound from the gallery. The interesting part is the color coded blocks that are dragged and dropped on the coding area, so learners do not need to learn the code but just drag/drop codes of block. It is more about understanding the purpose and meaning of the color coded blocks.
The lesson today started with demonstrating some basic commands in Scratch. I did ask the learners to think about the differences between Turtle Academy and Scratch interface and discuss how they are different. It was great to see they could pick up differences, like in Scratch there are color coded blocks, a huge sprites gallery, background gallery, lots of tutorials step wise, its colorful etc. Where as Turtle Academy has a more simple user interface, it is not that colorful and mostly the users have to write commands to create shapes etc. They need to remember the commands as well. Though the lessons in Turtle Academy are like guides and very helpful too. It may not be very visual or graphically appealing but can surely help understand the basic coding.
I demonstrated to the learners how to add a sprite, remove or delete a sprite, add sound to the sprite, move a sprite on screen, spin the sprite , rotate the sprite, add background, add sound etc. Since all learners had access to the laptops, they could individually practice coding in Scratch. This helps a lot because every learner learns at their own pace. In the first try learners were able to add the sprites and add some motion to the sprites. Some learners could change the background before I could demonstrate how to change the background. One of the students who knew a little Scratch tried to create a scoring game using a score variable. It was a good try but somehow the score was not increased. And when asked for assistance, I opened a tutorial for him and I asked him to skim through the tutorial. I could see some coding was clearly missing. I wanted the learner to configure which part of the code was missing instead of writing the code for him. But it was good of him to try at least and create something of his own.
One of the students changed the background and added a bus sprite , and he added code to move the bus on the road. I suggested he should try adding sound, increasing / decreasing size of the bus etc And I suggested they try with adding different sprites on screen and try coding them. Another student added an ocean background, and inserted ocean animals on the screen as sprites. And he add code to move the sprites together on screen. This is a very interesting learning experience, learners can revise their learning from Science concepts as well. It was good good to see learners adding sprites matching their habitats like the ocean. Another student added a birthday cake as a sprite and added a birthday sound along with it. Another learner added a boy and his pet animal walking on a football ground. He could add motion to both sprites and move them on screen. Overall it was great to see learners practicing enthusiastically.
They were able to build some understanding regarding the colored blocks of code, they understood the following:
Motion block - to move objects on screen
Sound block - to add sound to the sprites on screen
Looks block - to add text for sprites for example greeting anyone etc
Events block - to add the event that cause the sprite to move
Variable block - to add variables (only a student tried this).
These learners are quick learners, they followed the instructions and were able to apply the code to the sprites. They were very creative in selecting the backgrounds. They could actually create animated stories with backgrounds and characters changing. That would be amazing. In the next lesson I would want to teach them how to animate their names and how to make a scoring game. I do take help from the tutorials and these are really helpful. In the end of the lesson I asked the learners to read the code in English, and it was great to see them trying to read in English. These are basically native Pushto speakers and English is very challenging for them. The practice of coding will definitely lead to enhancing speaking and reading skills too. Overall a good lesson though learners still need a lot of practice.
Enjoy Reading till my next post soon InnshaaAllah.
Regards and prayers
Sheeba Ajmal
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