Scratch Jr: Perfect for New Coders

Phew, this has been a bumper crop of blog posts this week! These activities and photos were all captured earlier in the term but I haven't had the time to write them up until now.

 After our Unplugged week, we started with Scratch Jr. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, it seemed like a natural progression from solving concrete puzzles on the floor with 'arrow code' on whiteboards to Scratch Jr's block code, largely featuring arrows. The other reason was that our school network was still recovering from the lightning damage and my plans to use Google Slides were on hold due to no connectivity. So, we dived right back into more coding.

I immediately found that Scratch Jr was completely accessible to students of all ages. The blocks are large and intuitive and the app comes loaded with a large number of sample projects that you and your students can pick apart for ideas. Once I gave them a short intro session to get them comfortable with the layout of the app, my students tucked in under the tables and gave it a go. I hope my students aren't the only ones who enjoy hiding under the desks when working with iPads? They almost all choose it over sitting at their tables.

From the beginning, the narrative prospects of Scratch Jr shone. Students wanted to tell stories with it, right away utilising the voice recording block to add sound effects and speech to their creations. Student choreographed dance routines and loved the stage background where they could showcase their dancers. My Grade 0 students particularly loved the activity where we turned the default Scratch Cat into a space cat and got it to dance. This project let them display their creativity with altering the Scratch Cat sprite and no child had the same outcome as another.

The possibilities of Scratch Jr are vast. I can see multiple grades using this app to recreate familiar narratives like The Three Little Pigs and programming the sprites to move to enhance their story. I can see older grades using it to make a choice story - one where a choice the player makes changes what happens in the game. We will defninitely be using a lot more of Scratch Jr.

"It's an evil cake and the red block makes it go around over and over again."