What did you learn about Coding with Scratch? What was new to you? What did you struggle with? What did you enjoy? Did you take any extensions during the workshop? What did you wish you learned more about?

I learned that I really should have had access to this as a kid because I would have LOVED it. I tried a photoshop and 3D animation after school program and found the 3D animation too difficult to really get good at unless I spent more than one day a week there. Photoshop, on the other hand, I figured out pretty quickly. I loved scanning in my drawings, cleaning up the lines or redrawing them, and then painting them. The place even had a nice colour printer and glossy paper. This Scratch stuff would have been my jam as a kid. I would have animated my own scripts and made mini cartoons.

With scratch, I found I struggled the most with the “schedule” that was built to guide the learning. I’m the kind of person to be thrown in a sandbox and left to learn and fail. I also really prefer taking my own pace. If I’d been told the follow the directions in the program and then put my hand up if I made a mistake or got lost, that would have suited my own personal learning better than the group step by step format.

I wish we’d learned more about the video type things that I’d heard scratch could do. I’m a little confused between what I read in Lifetime Kindergarten by Mitchel Resnick and what I experienced during the lesson. I thought we could do videos OR make video games, but I feel like the lesson mostly focused on game coding. If you wanted to make a video, how would you do that? “At x time stamp so and so does x”? I didn’t find any coding for such an “action.”

How does/can coding fit into your grade level and/or subject area you are teaching? Did you think of any possible lessons or learning opportunities for your students/subject area? What connections did you make?

In music, if scratch can really be used in making video like I think it can, I think it would be a great activity for students to write music to their own little story. Perhaps if there could be some cross curricular connection and coordination with a teacher from another class like drama.

Do you think that you would consider bringing coding to one of your practicum experiences at UNBC (i.e. EDUC. 391, EDUC 490, EDUC 491) or future practice? What do you still need to learn? What would be your next steps?

While I would love to use scratch on a regular basis for music lessons, one of the issues with that is that they’re already learning how to play an instrument. That in a way is its own “coding.” You have to learn certain fingerings and ways of using your breath to make the correct sounds. I think throwing scratch at beginner musicians would be a bit much for them. The other issue I have with scratch as a way to expand and broaden curricular targets is the issue of usage — like any musical instrument, scratch must be practiced for students to become good at it. If they aren’t already competent with it, and I have to spend months teaching them how to use it, then I’ve made the entire class about learning software instead of using the software for learning. Moving forward, my next steps would be “how could I make an assignment or activity reasonable within the framework of an inexperienced user so that it could be useful for learning in my classroom.” We can’t expect every student to love scratch as much as some others do when they engage in “play” with new software, such as I did with Photoshop or others do with woodworking and building projects.