Observation of Amy and Jamie

Before winter break I had the opportunity to observe Amy at her school just a few blocks away from my office!  It was so great to just step inside another school to see what life was like in another world.  Amy also teaches older students so it was great to be surrounded by students older than I am used to.  As I walked into the computer lab the students were just opening their SCRATCH projects.  They had been working on holiday greeting cards and were using this time for more work time.  It amazed me to walk around and see what the students had created.  I have been working with younger students with SCRATCH so the ability of these older students was really amazing.  I learned from Amy that she had really only done some introduction with the students and they had really taught themselves a lot of what they were doing.  One student had a little guy skiing down a hill...the stage would keep changing so it looked like the skier was actually traveling really fast down the mountain...then on one of the stages there was a jump that they guy took and crashed into a tree...it was totally amazing and I still can't imagine how he did it.  This is the beauty of SCRATCH and why teachers don't need to worry about their abilities with SCRATCH.  The kids will teach themselves anything they need to know.  The students are much better at debugging and figuring things out than I am!  My other favorite project was a student who had a dancing snowman on the card, then a dog came along and did some business on the snowman and when the dog left the screen part of the snowman was yellow.  This totally cracked me up!  How creative and funny!

Amy also taught the kids how to upload some music to play in the background of their greeting card.  I learned so much about the potential of SCRATCH for students by observing Amy.  It was good to see the things that some older students could create using the program.  

Yesterday, I drove down to Apple Valley to observe Jamie introducing SCRATCH to some second grade students.  It was a great contrast to what I watched with Amy teaching the older students.  Jamie did a great job introducing SCRATCH by having a bird on the scratch stage that would respond to her voice.  When Jamie would talk the beak of the bird would move.  The bird's eye would also blink ever once and a while. The second grade students got a kick out of this.  The introduction of SCRATCH was very basic and Jamie just let the kids really explore what the program had to offer.  I was surprised to find out what second grade students would discover when told very little about "how to" use the program.  The kids were finding all the different sprites, they could make the sprite move, they could grow and shrink the sprite, they could make it turn and change color.  The final project the second grade students were going to do was animate their name, but this was a really great lesson in how kids really can figure out programs with exploration.  For the second time I learned that I don' t have to be an expert at this program in order to introduce and use it with students. 

Great job girls.  I really enjoyed being in your school and classrooms!
See you soon!
Molly