scratch

Mar 12 2014

Visiting the Computing Club

I recently wrote about the establishment this year of a computing club at Goochland Elementary by our elementary ITRT, Zoe Parrish.

I came back to visit the club more recently this week and had the pleasure of talking to several of the students about projects they were deeply engaged with when I arrived.

I’ve published this podcast below. The programs referenced in the podcast are:

Each of the services/programs are free. Learning to program helps develop inventive thinking skills, logical thinking, and taps into a student’s creativity in becoming challenged to problem solve.

Thank you to each of the students for their time this past week and to Ms. Parrish for inspiring fun and appropriately challenging learning for our students!

Episode #166 of TechTimes Live [ 11:28 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

By John Hendron • For Parents • • Tags: khan, podcast, scratch

Feb 24 2014

When I reflect upon my short career in education, I think it is nothing short of extraordinary what I have learned since I started. So much of the “stuff” I deal with today is based upon what I have learned since I started. The genesis of what I apply in my job, of course, had a much longer history (learning LOGO in 1980; taking BASIC classes in 1981-1983; first use of Photoshop in 1991; visiting NeXTWorld and meeting Steve Jobs in 1991; co-founding a computer business while in high school with a best friend, etc., etc.). For me, what I get to do is an application of a lifetime’s worth of experiences.

From 2003-2007 I started learning about the constructivist-based learning projects that came out of MIT, specifically because of our pioneer, Seymour Papert. His brand of psychology of learning was called constructionism, and his protege, Dr. Mitch Resnick, went on to help develop Scratch. Among his experiences, he participated in a number of after school computer clubs for kids, in an effort to help them develop skills in computer programming and to gain practice in the “art” of design thinking.

I have met Resnick on two occasions (at Scratch conferences at MIT in Cambridge) and consider him one of my heroes in the cross-section fields of education and technology.

It was with special interest to learn several years ago that a student at BES had started his own Scratch club. I am not sure he’ll ever know how proud I am of him wanting to a) share his passion for using Scratch and b) starting an after-school club. I remember telling Ms. Cantor after going to our first Scratch conference together how important it was that we establish some after-school clubs in Goochland using this software. I felt we had a moral obligation.

Real life got in my own way.

So it was with especial renewed interest to find this year, that our new elementary ITRT, Ms. Parrish, set out to establish her own computing club at GES. I’ve stayed out of it, but today I paid a very short visit to discover what they have been up to. I found a number of eager students, across different grade levels, using the Khan Academy’s programming modules to apply their understanding of Javascript to drawing and starting animation.

What I saw, I think, was remarkable, for several instances of evidence.

Every student was independently engaged in their own task. I can’t say it was the most social of experiences, but I witnessed a lot of experimentation going on with many students. “What happens if I change this value? What happens if I add a new variable? Oh look! I got it to move the way I wanted!!”
I saw students helping students overcome challenges. While Khan basically allows you to learn on autopilot, it was satisfying to see some students helping their peers.
I witnessed the joy of play. Some students were playing a few of the games they wanted to learn to create. These projects they want to create weren’t mere academic exercises, they were real things like entertaining games.
Students were thoughtful and deliberate. I talked with students who knew what they were trying to accomplish and, in one case, felt “inspired.” One student displayed for my benefit a picture she had saved and easily retrieved on her iPad, of a Monsters, Inc. character she had drawn in Javascript. Once she displayed it for me, she set up her iPad next to the laptop, as if the little one-eyed monster was a muse to serenade her onto learning how to animate her character.

I hope to pay them a visit again soon, and I want to record a podcast with Ms. Parrish and the students in her club. I am proud that in Goochland we have our own computer clubhouse. I have a feeling Dr. Papert would be proud.

Kudos to our club members and their mentor, Ms. Parrish.

By John Hendron • General News • • Tags: clubhouse, elementary, khan, papert, scratch

Mar 19 2013

May I?

I had a great opportunity this week to work with some students. My goal was to “introduce them” to Scratch, and we only had an hour. The small group of students ranged from grades 2-5 (7 in total). By the end, we had customized a template I created to come up with a simple video game.

In our short time together, they learned about:

sprites,
backgrounds,
blocks and stacks,
changing costumes,
recording sounds,
adding variables,
and using keyboard controls in the game.

Scratch Game

I am quite confident they didn’t understand all of that, at least in the context of variables and even the complete Cartesian plane in Scratch, but together, in that multiage group, as a whole, we were getting there. That alone, was exciting.

But then several questions I received made me step back and take notice. They were framed as such: “May I record another sound?” or “Can I make the name of mine something different?” or “Can I paint mine differently?”

It was if the students were asking permission to exercise creativity. Creativity might have gotten into the way of my organized time with them, but those questions ultimately saddened me! Whatever structures were in place that required students to ask permission to be creative have to be assessed quickly—and changed. The desire to change things, to make things your own, is behind the constructionist-philosophy of learning upon which Scratch is based.

We have a lot of work to do, as schools. But I had a great time in the experience today, and it was especially fulfilling to see these students look forward to greeting their parents when it was time to go home, proud to show them the small games they had created. “Look at what I created!” was the gist of every greeting. On our best days, students should be proud to show what they have created. And that’s something to celebrate.

For more on Scratch, visit this page.

By John Hendron • General News • • Tags: scratch

Jan 29 2013

Let’s Teach Kids to Code

Great TED Talk from Professor Mitch Resnick from MIT, whom I’ve had the pleasure to meet.

By John Hendron • Learning for Teachers, Resource of Interest • • Tags: scratch, stem

Aug 20 2012

Sebastién to speak Monday evening in a Virtual World

Many folks don’t know that in another (virtual) life, my name is Sebastién. Tonight I (I mean, Sebastién), will be speaking on VSTE Island in Second Life, about students using Scratch – a free platform for creating, designing, and problem solving.

This free event begins at 8 PM EDT by following the link above. If you’ve never experienced the virtual world SecondLife, you’ll first need to download the application and select an avatar.

The Virginia Society for Technology in Education maintains an “island” for professional development in this virtual world. Come join us!

By John Hendron • Learning for Teachers • • Tags: scratch, secondlife

Jul 28 2012

Scratch at MIT 2012

Right now I’m listening about the STEM initiatives at Ramapo Schools in New York. For the third grade, all students are engaged with Scratch projects as part of their computational thinking unit. They see Scratch being used as a STEM development tool and have used the MIT Scratch curriculum guide. Based upon a creative computing perspective, they focus on being iterative and incremental, reusing and remixing, abstracting and modularizing, and testing and debugging. They also use a engineering design process.

Bea and I are attending and the following video summarizes some of our experiences at this year’s conference.

Scratch at MIT 2012 from John Hendron on Vimeo.

We had the opportunity to present on Friday to a group of educators from Texas and Virginia. We shared our own Scratch resources created last year for training and use with students.

Students from Ramapo are now sharing their projects on the stage here at the Media Lab. I believe all of our third and fourth graders could engage in computational thinking too. I’m looking forward to bringing these types of experiences to students in Goochland!

By John Hendron • General News • • Tags: 2012, mit, scratch, scratchmit2012

Jul 17 2012

Out of Our Minds – Part 2

Continuing my traversal of Ken Robinson’s book… I came across this quote at the end of Chapter 4.

Human intelligence includes the capacity for academic activity; this does not mean that academic activity is the whole of intelligence.

Scratch Project

This is something I believe and is the reason why I believe strongly in “ways of learning” that aren’t tied to reading books. These include hands-on exploration, computing, and kinetic activity, including the arts of dance, painting, singing, playing an instrument, or building something.

This week I’m away from Goochland on vacation – but I’m spending my vacation doing Scratch training in Chesterfield, working with teachers from Goochland, Dinwiddie, Powhatan, Maggie Walker, and Hanover. I hope they’re having fun. My blog post for this is located here.

We’re exploring the different types of projects you can complete in Scratch, all based around a design-model of pedagogy. The photos above feature our foray into story-telling with the inspiration coming from six-word stories (blame Hemmingway). I get excited to see the traditional ways of thinking about teaching fall away the deeper we get into creating creative projects with a tool such as Scratch.

We’ve got an awesome mix of teachers, from elementary, SPED, middle school, and high school backgrounds, including teachers of world languages and those in technology.

And it all goes back to Ken Robinson’s quote above: there are profound opportunities to develop one’s intelligence (or for humankind to show their intelligence) outside of the world of “academic” learning. My experience this week is reminding me what a great place we have for learning in Goochland.

By John Hendron • General News • • Tags: g21, robinson, scratch

Mar 8 2012

EdTech 2012

I will be presenting with my colleague Bea Cantor at EdTech 2012 in Petersburg, VA on March 14-15, 2012.

Below find resources for my presentations:

Scratch Resources
iOS Best Practices and Tips
Movies with iOS Instructor Guide
Video in the Classroom
Movies with iOS ePub
iBooks Author on iOS
From Flat to Fabulous – ePub book on creating ebooks with Pages

By John Hendron • Resource of Interest • • Tags: conference, edtech, epub, ibooks, iOS, scratch

Jan 6 2012

Avoiding Potholes

Today I had the pleasure of introducing Scratch to some of Lisa Brown’s students at Goochland Elementary School.

While some students had used Scratch in the past, some had not! I started with an example file (available here with instructions) that gives students the problem of how to form a game using the character of a car and the foe of a pothole. It’s an open-ended project, although one solution is provided in the link above.

Scratch is free software that runs on Macs, Windows PCs, and Linux. While students see it as game- and story-creating software, it’s an “introduction to programming” tool from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

By John Hendron • General News • • Tags: ges, scratch

Apr 20 2011

A Game to Teach

When I recently visited Byrd, I met with a student who has been working on his GRIP project using Scratch.

Scratch Game

I was amazed by the complexity of his game, which combines a story line with 13 levels, inviting players to recall their multiplication facts. I had worked with this student earlier in the year, introducing him to the concept of an array, which in Scratch, is called a list. He used lists to create his questions and check them to see if they were right.

On one hand, I was so impressed with what this student was able to do working mostly independently. The other, was his tale of putting his game on every iMac in the lab, and inviting all third graders to come in and play his game. “Only 1 student made it to level 13…” He reported that most students liked his game. “How did it make you feel to see all your classmates playing your game?”

He paused.

“It felt pretty good, I guess.”

We hope to feature his game soon after spring break on the BES website.

By John Hendron • General News • • Tags: game, scratch

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