It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. – Albert Einstein
Scratch Club
Why Scratch?
Scratch is a very popular visual programming language that is created and hosted by MIT online. It can be used by kids and parents to easily create games, animations etc. It also teaches many basic programming concepts, such as loop and if, without kids noticing it. This is quite useful for kids to get to learn "real" programming language. It's a very powerful tool for educational or presentation purposes.
Scratch Resources:
Scratch is visual language that is easy to learn. It is hosted on scratch.mit.edu. They have pretty nice tutorial there. The club recommends parents and kids to start learning scratch from Google code cs-first.com. There they have a process to form or join an existing scratch club, a line of scratch projects ideas dependent on the theme your club selects, and teaching plans for those projects.
We also recommend book "Learn to Program with Scratch: A Visual Introduction to Programming with Games, Art, Science, and Math", it has more detailed information and useful projects for Scratch.
Teams Introduction:
3rd grade girls team
The 3rd grade girls scratch team has 5 students and take turns led by volunteer guru parent. We use cs-first.com as our main teaching site and projects will be assigned to the students every meet. Also the parents will alternate hosting the classes.
Followed the plans on cs-first.com, we learn basic Scratch elements, the way of loop and conditions. Girls share their projects after each meeting and demo their work. We finished part of game design theme. It was really fun.
In fall there are new girls member join and may start a new theme.
4th grade team
Kids in this group also uses cs-first.com, they did many projects, but parent/volunteer also gives homework and other projects to supplement the teaching plan. In 2 months most kids finished the scratch learning!