Scratch: Racetrack

Second term is upon us here at Bridge House School. For our coding club, we have moved onto the ambitious task of coding games in Scratch. As themes go, gaming is the theme that is the most motivating for my students. I have 9 excited youngsters who are all eager to recreate Minecraft - I've had to sadly put things in perspective for them and explained that it might take years (!) to be able to make something as good as Minecraft.

For now, we are starting off with an excellent racing game template from CS First. Even though I'm not running my coding club through the CS First website, their resources and templates are invaluable. So far, my students are working on the following:

• Changing sprite costumes, using the built-in library
• Creating their own sprites
• Sprite movement using keyboard keys (forward movement as well as left / right turn)
• Altering the stage backgrounds to create their own race tracks
• Populating the track with decorative sprites who have text speech

A few groups have even figured out how to program keyboard keys to change backgrounds and racers between costumes. This is an enormous amount of learning in a couple of weeks. Next week I hope to tackle the exciting element of sound, if sprite 1 touches sprite 2 then a chosen sound will be played. The students are very excited about the idea of adding 'crash' sounds when a racer touches another. The finale will be to play each other's games - a true test of how 'good' their creation is.

As the race track has been set up to be a two-player game, I have asked them to try and work in pairs. This has been extremely effective - this age-group codes better in pairs because they are able to work on their problems out loud. They have a built-in person to discuss the code with and two sets of eyes to spot coding problems. The only slight downside is that we have an odd number in our club, so I have to encourage them to try out working as different pairs.

Once we get tired of the racing track idea we can try and move onto a maze game. All of the guides for these activities are included on CS First, so I highly recommend going through their material to see what interests you.

Our young coders get to grips with the race track using Scratch.