Scratch Club at Thoreau Elementary

Background: The club was every Wednesday after school for an hour. We had between 7 and 10 fourth and fifth graders each week, and met in the library. One of the limitations we had was that we shared the library with the Math Club, which was students from K-3. Because of this, we couldn't as easily do activities away from the computers, and we didn't have a way to use a projector. The other main limitation was that the club was only 5 normal weeks long, plus one extra week.

Week 1: We started out making nametags. Thanks to a sympathetic teacher, we were able to borrow a classroom for the first 15 minutes on the first day, and use the projector. This was really, really nice since it got us away from the computers in the library and the noise from the other club, and let us demonstrate the basics of Scratch to all the students at once. We used the projector for:

After this introduction, we brought the students back to the library to use the computers. For the first day, we mostly tried to get them involved and trying things out. Several of the students had strong opinions about what they wanted to make, but for others it was nice that we'd preloaded our sample projects on the computers for them to look at, as well as having a set of Scratch Cards so they could get ideas for things to try out.

Week 2: We didn't have much of a plan for the second week. We let the students come up with whatever they wanted -- which was a mix of games and animations of sprites representing other students in the class exploding/melting.

Week 3: Leslie wrote a lesson for us to teach: a magic 8 ball, complete with a physical one for them to look at. As soon as we got there, though, we found out we had a new challenge -- two students who had turned in their permission slips late, and therefore hadn't been there for the first two lessons. Luckily, Andrea was there to visit for the week, so she could help Leslie out with the lesson while I tried to bring the two new students up to speed. I collected a gallery of finished student projects. As you can see, the students got creative.

The 8 Ball lesson was a good one: it had motion, a forever loop, an ask block, and best of all, a list. It took most of the hour, partly because the kids were interested enough in adding their own answers.

Week 4: The plan was to do a dance party lesson (Lena's week to plan), but due to a combination of unfortunate factors (Leslie was scheduled to arrive late; the bus broke down on Lena's way over) it was already close to halfway through the time by when we could start. Plus, the kids were pretty into whatever they had been working on by this point. So we just helped them work on whatever they wanted. We did show one of them how to use broadcast to make his animation easier.

Week 5: Dance Party, take 2! We were somewhat concerned that the kids wouldn't think this was cool or interesting and would rebel. Apparently we didn't need to worry. After a little initial grumbling, they got to work. Leslie and I each took half of the students and walked them through changing costumes for the dance and then using broadcast to get the buttons working. This took probably 10-15 minutes, and then we let them do whatever they wanted. To my surprise, a lot of them kept working on the dance project for a while -- duplicating sprites, adding music, etc. One of the students even made a button to change the song, and iterated through a list of sounds. Considering that involved both lists and variables (and pointers/references, for that matter), I was pretty impressed! Once again, I made a gallery of finished dance projects.

At the end of the session, we found out that it had been the last week! We asked whether we could have one more sesion so that we could invite the parents to come see the projects their children had made, and we were allowed to do it.

Week 6: We told the parents to come at 3:50, halfway through the session. For the first half hour, we encouraged each student to pick a project they wanted to demonstrate to everyone. (We were informed that 10-year-olds are too old for show-and-tell, so we did project presentations). Some of the students decided to start new projects, and were unwilling to be dissuaded, so that could have been improved. The math club was over so we could use the projector/smart board to display the projects. The students wanted to show off more than one project each, and if we had had let them, I think they would have kept going for another 20 minutes, showing off every project they had made.

Things I learned

One thing that I would change if I did this again is to have more concrete lessons planned for each week. I think the first week was okay to let them play around, but by the second week some students had great ideas and were coming up with cool things, while others would start a project, get frustrated after 5 minutes, and then start over, repeatedly. Having an activity planned for the first 15 or 20 minutes would maybe give some ideas to the students who were feeling uninspired. The magic eight ball and dance party were both succesful, and for other sessions maybe something like a spirograph (uses pen + motion) or a guessing/math game (using ask, say, if/else, and points) would be good choices.

The students were really into showing one another what they had come up with, which was good: they would get ideas or ask one another how to do things. The less good part was that there was sometimes maybe a bit too much competition. One student on the first day started making a calculator, and we ended up with a lot of students working on the same thing. The other kind of annoying choice of activity was making sprites, having them say "Hi my name is <name of fellow student>" and then having the sprite explode/melt/catch fire. While this did teach them about animation, and it seemed like no one was getting upset, it got old pretty fast.

Some logistical things: find out exactly how many sessions there will be, and when! Also, make sure to have emergency contact information for the club in case something happens and everyone is going to be late.

I think in general the club would have been better if we would have had a few more weeks. That way, we could have devoted the last several sessions to working on bigger projects to show off to the parents.

The website: I sent home an information sheet explaining how to sign up for an account on the Scratch Website and how to share projects there. I got 4 of the students to add me as a friend and started putting their projects in my gallery. I think it was kind of nice to be able to see what they were up to, and I am hoping that I will continue to see cool things from them even once the club is over.

Challenges

The layout of the room made it difficult, since we couldn't use a projector and it was hard to talk to the kids away from the computers. It would probably be a lot easier if the club could be held in the downstairs lab (plus, then it wouldn't be limited by having only 12 computers (some of which didn't always work)). Related: if you use the library computers, be aware that one of them has a touch-screen. We had to declare that no one got to use it to stop them from fighting over it every week.

Five sessions wasn't really enough. Six was better, but I think having a full 10 or 12 sessions would make everything a lot easier, and you could get to cooler projects.

Students joining late -- we got two who only came in week 3. The first two weeks were pretty important, and the new students would have been lost if we had tried to just get them to jump right in making the magic 8 ball, which meant we had to run two lessons at the same time, one for the new students and one for the ones who had been there every week. We also had problems with students being absent for several sessions, which is a challenge for lessons that build upon one another.

Redirecting student creativity. As mentioned above, some of the students wanted to make kind of mean animations of sprites representing other students, like melting snowmen or explosions. Other students just wanted to copy the kid next to them, or were more interested in drawing than programming, or just played with sample games. The challenge is to refocus them on more constructive projects.

Being authority figures. I'm not very imposing, and it was sometimes very difficult to get the kids to listen (once they actually listened, they usually were willing to do what we said, though).

Different abilities/prior experience with Scratch. We had one student who had used Scratch on his own before, which meant that he was sometimes bored. If there are repeat students next year, I guess that will be even more of a problem. A couple of the students were also spending time at home playing with Scratch, which meant that they were picking up things faster than the students who only used Scratch during Scratch Club.