Young Innovator Program – Scratch

We had one group working with Scratch coding this last term in our Young Innovator Program workshops.  This series of workshops was facilitated by Emily de la Pena’s CodingKids tutors and I am always amazed at how much progress these young students can make in a relatively short time period with this form of coding.   I also am always super interested in the challenging nature of the tasks involved and how it supports kids’ problem solving, their persistence and resilience as they strive to get things working the way they want them to.

Below is one animation created by Oscar, in Yr 3 and when I visited him towards the end of the final session, he was deep in thought as he wrestled with the simultaneous nature of the things he needed to get working and the final scene of the rocket launching towards the moon which was particularly challenging:

The way Scratch works is that you have control over each of the ‘sprites’ or objects/characters you add to your creation.   For example, in the image below, Ghost 1 is selected and so this is the sprite we are coding or controlling.  Each of them can be controlled using any one of the script categories seen on the right of this image

Gobo was the first sprite needing to do something and so he was controlled in Oscar’s animation with the below series of scripts.  You can see that this involved several simultaneous actions, some message broadcasting  and receiving and the use of the grid coordinates or cartesian plane coordinates on the stage area.  Importantly, for the development of computational thinking, Oscar has included a loop bracket as an efficient way to get his sprite to do something.

Ghost was the next sprite to spring into action, this occurring when he received conversation from Gobo.

The Moon sprite didn’t appear in this animation until it received the space broadcast:

And finally, he has to work on the the rocket launch and what this meant in terms of the angle of flight  he needed it to have  and the consideration of timing so it happened at the time he needed it to happen.   This involved looking at the coordinates and size aspects to provide some perspective.   This part of the animation included some mathematical reasoning and problem solving including angles and coordinates

For those who would like to play around further with the idea of broadcasting (very powerful), try watching this tutorial video:

 

Within Mathematics for Year 3, listed on the National Curriculum we have:

At this year level:

  • understanding includes connecting number representations with number sequences, partitioning and combining numbers flexibly, representing unit fractions, using appropriate language to communicate times, and identifying environmental symmetry
  • fluency includes recalling multiplication facts, using familiar metric units to order and compare objects, identifying and describing outcomes of chance experiments, interpreting maps and communicating positions
  • problem-solving includes formulating and modelling authentic situations involving planning methods of data collection and representation, making models of three-dimensional objects and using number properties to continue number patterns
  • reasoning includes using generalising from number properties and results of calculations, comparing angles and creating and interpreting variations in the results of data collections and data display

More specifically:

Location and transformation

Create and interpret simple grid maps to show position and pathways (ACMMG065)

Geometric reasoning

Identify angles as measures of turn and compare angle sizes in everyday situations (ACMMG064)

Number and PlaceValue

Recognise, model, represent and order numbers to at least 10 000 (ACMNA052)