Designing a Digital Solution

As part of a current Geography unit in Year 5,  the students are preparing to design and create a digital solution for educating our community about preparing and dealing with a natural disaster.

One of the options for them is to use Scratch coding to create an animation or story or quiz.   Today we worked as a class to understand the components within Scratch that allowed for a quiz style creation.

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To start the lesson, the students watched a couple of quizzes that were freely available on the Scratch site to understand the question and answer style format and then looked at one of mine which was a simple ‘yes’, ‘no’ answer one.   After doing this, we looked at the coding inside.

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It was important for students to understand that two types of data within programming – constants and variables, with constants being the data that does not change and variables being the data that does – for example the type of data that comes from user input.

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We discussed that in this case, the variable would be the answers and we explored the appropriate blocks for working in this way.   We also had to include a ‘If, Then’ block which allowed us to say what would happen in the event of a correct answer and then what would happen in the event of an incorrect answer.

A really interesting and useful feature of scratch was introduced -the backpack. This allowed students to store whole chunks of code to be used again and again.  In the case of a quiz, this would be invaluable as the same chunk of code could be re-used and then just modified to suit the new question and answer.

It was interesting to see the students working and to witness the usual struggle that goes along with this kind of coding – and the perseverance and resilience that is necessary to enable them to push through the frustrations.     Equally interesting and satisfying is watching them fly along once the basic understanding is attained and upon realising they were in control and able to work towards an outcome.

The differentiation potential of this type of activity is significant.  Very able child are able to include sounds, additional movements, backgrounds and many other actions.   Less able children can still work towards the same goal but by using the same chunk of code again and again.