Scratch for Coding

We looked at a platform called Scratch, which is a free block-based programming language often used to teach and practice coding at a beginning level. Scratch has a few built-in tutorials that users can follow to create different projects, but the creative freedom is truly endless. I like Scratch because it gives students another outlet to express themselves that they may not have accessed or experienced before. It combines creativity with technical programming skills, and once students get a feel for the program they can really create anything through it. There are so many things that you can do through coding, like create games, animations, tell stories, website design, create art and graphics, and much more. These can all be done through the Scratch coding platform.

During EDCI 336, we took time to play around in Scratch and explore some of it’s features. The platform can seem overwhelming at first simply due to the sheer amount of options and features, but it’s actually quite simple and user-friendly. This is where the tutorials come in handy – it gives you somewhere to start when you are just figuring it out, especially because Scratch is often a student’s first exposure to coding. In class, we learned about the benefits of collaboration and working in pairs when using technology, so some of my classmates chose to work together. (Scratch actually has a built-in social feature where users can post their projects and other online users can view, edit, and collaborate on them) It was some of my classmates’ first time using Scratch or any coding platform at all. Personally, I was already familiar with the block-based language and the program itself because I had used it when they first introduced coding to the curriculum when I was in high school. In this class, we were all given one task: create a project featuring your name and share it with the class.

I decided to go for an animation, but some of my classmates made things like interactive graphics and games. A cool one that I saw in class was a game where the player clicks on each letter of the name, and it would move, play a sound, or change colours. They did this by attaching trigger events and actions to each letter. It was difficult at first deciding what I wanted to do with all of the options available.

I used the motion, looks, sound, events, and control blocks to make her “glide” across the room and perform the actions that I wanted. This was fairly straightforward because I was already familiar with the program, but I think I could have figured it out quickly because of how the blocks are laid out and categorized, and because of the easy “drag and drop” style of writing lines of code.