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Our school gained access to Scratch a couple of months ago. I had introduced
some of my students to MicroWorlds some months ago; a French teacher
introduced all of his students to Scratch and they have had more time to
explore it than MicroWorlds.
As I continued to work with a small group of students on MicroWorlds after
school, one or two of them defected and only wanted to work on Scratch. They
seemed to find it more fun and user-friendly. As soon as I witnessed their
excitement and ease in using Scratch, I too began to wonder if Scratch might
be a better programming environment for today's students. Just because we as
teachers are more familiar and comfortable with MW doesn't mean that there
aren't compelling reasons for us to consider a switch to a more user-friendly
environment for kids.
When it came time to use one of these programming environments to create some
activities for a Math Family Fun Night we are planning, some of the students
wanted to use Scratch.
Snce I am completely unfamiliar with it, I asked them, as we considered
updating a MicroWorlds project that generates random crowds: "Can Scratch
generate thousands of randomly-placed pictures, selecting randomly among a
collection of shapes, as MicroWorlds can? Can it keep and report scores?"
Perhaps they had not familiarized themselves with all of the capabilities of
Scratch, but after I asked my questions, they seemed to think it would be
better to stick with MicroWorlds for that activity.
When another group wanted to produce a Jeopardy game show, I asked more
questions to determine if we could build this game show in Scratch. Once
again, the students who were familiar with both programming environments
seemed to think we would be better off using MicroWorlds. (Frankly, I still
think we might have been better off using a Jeopardy PowerPoint template!)
I have always liked what is commonly said about Logo, "It has a low threshold
and no ceiling." It seems that Scratch has an even lower threshold. (I found
Daniel's examples very compelling.)
But what I'd like to know is: Does Scratch have a ceiling?
Wendy
> Do you think Scratch is a better balance ... for elementary school and
> middle school kids?
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