After School (Middle School) Computer Programming Club

[Alan Yorinks]

Hi All,

    I will be leading an after school Scratch programming club starting this fall. This is the first time for both the school and me so I need all the help I can get. I will have approximately 15 students from the 5th through the 8th grades, and we will be meeting once a week.

    A little bit about myself - I am a retired embedded software engineer ( a fancy way to say that I wrote programs that controlled hardware - mostly in the telecom industry), and was hired in the fall of 2012 to work as a Special Education teaching assistant at my local middle school. This latest gig has been a blast!

    I have also taught programming languages (Java, C, and C++) as an Adjunct at a New Jersey state university, trained professional engineers in both C++ and Java, and currently work as a literacy volunteer (adult literacy).

    Please feel free to look at the Intro in my electronic notebook if you want a better sense of my teaching philosophy for the club.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1y9OpXxcBTbzwOPzq24ndPI5nCOcZobtNdQ7tOh6k3Pc/edit#slide=id.p

     I am starting to put together my club lesson ideas and am looking for guidance from those have been down this road. I will be happy to share any knowledge I have about programming, or my life experiences if that can be of help to you.

Thanks,

Alan Yorinks

[Matt Sendorek]

Alan - You will have a whale of a time!  I currently run an after-school Computer Club for eight 8 to 9-year-olds.  The aim is that they have fun, and they do - sound effects, including their own recordings, are particularly popular.  I generally try to kick off with something I have created to spark their interest, then show how they can easily do likewise.  I find that having available a few laminated sheets with the key points is useful.  It can be tricky dealing with multiple simultaneous questions (always 'urgent'!) once they get going.  Good luck!  Matt.

 

[Alison Statton]

It is also helpful if you can have students mentor each other.  If they work as partners or teams, they can learn from each other.  I find it helpful to have a "free exploration" activity at the beginning  so you informally assess students strengths and weaknesses.  And this sounds really obvious but make sure the hardware is working correctly and everything is up to date before students come to club meetings.  You don't want to waste valuable programming time fixing a hardware issue. 

[Alan Yorinks]

Thanks Matt and Alison, that is great advice. It helps reinforce that I am on the right track. The tip about testing the hardware is a good one, especially with the network at our school. 

Alan

[PK Shiu]

Hi,

I am doing the same thing as you, running workshops for K-6 but most of my kids are 8-9 y.o.

I also get the "please please help me now!!!" a lot, but I find that if I let them wait it out, often they either find their own solutions, or as someone suggested, peer instructions always work out.

P.K.

[Angelo Vicente]

Hi, for the last 4 months i have been using scratch in 22 of my classes, i started by implementing the curriculum draft from the scratch webpage. the students love it  but it is difficult to not answer student questions directly but rather let them explore. i also found it easier to use scratch 1.4 because the internet is not always available in the building. If anyone is using the curriculum and has suggestions i would love to hear them. if anyone is interested in the logistics of delivering scratch to over 500 students a week i would be more than happy to give you my ideas.

Good luck to all

[Claude Terosier]

Hello,

Thank all for all your ideas. Like Alan, I am also starting afterschool classes next fallfor kids 8 to 9, and it is very helpful.

Angelo, what is the curriculum draft?

I am also very interested to hear more on how you deliver scratch to over 500 students a week, as I was wondering about to handle volume.

Claude

[Aleksander Gajda]

Hi,
I'm starting afterschool classes on September too. I think it's a good idea to share experiences. Claude, I found

Scratch Curriculum Guide Draft in French for you. Here is link http://scratched.media.mit.edu/resources/scratch-curriculum-guide-draft-french.

Aleksander

[Claude Terosier]

Thank you Aleksander, it's great! I'm going to read it and use it extensively! It will probably be very interesting to put it in perspective with all we are doing in this CCOW.

Claude

[Claude Terosier]

And BTW and loved your about me project, I was very impressed whan I found it by chance in the studio.

Claude

[Alan Yorinks]

Wow, thanks everyone, this input has been invaluable. It gives me the confidence to proceed with my plans knowing that providing minimal lecture, maximum hands on, and sharing works! Hmmm, kind of sounds like CCOW ;-).

[Alan Yorinks]

Someone who is running a summer program that includes Scratch, mentioned that they bring in outside "customers". The campers then use Scratch to produce a "commercial" for the customer.

I love this idea since it brings in the "big ideas" well beyond the mechanics of working with Scratch. In an after school club setting I started to think if I could provide this type of interaction as well. I think I can and here are some ideas:

1. Have students negotiate with their teachers to provide a lesson based simulation, story or demo using Scratch.

2. Have students provide "commercials" for other clubs and teams in the School. This can be shared in the weekly school TV episode.

3. Have students provide "consulting services" for other club members. A consultant might create a sprite, advise on ways to program or debug a project, provide the text for a story, or critique a project to see if it meets a customer's requirements.

Does this sound like a good or bad idea?

[AiBoon Tan]

Hi. I find the Scratch Cards very useful as an introduction to Scratch for new users.  I would go through one or two cards and then ask them to do the rest by themselves. I start off with 5 cards and then introduce them to projects. You can download the Scratch cards from the website. If you put them into a file holder, they will last longer.

I like the idea of using Scratch as a different medium for other lessons. My favourite is to ask kids to illustrate humorous poems or well-loved nursery rhymes.
Here is a link to my Scratch A Nursery Rhyme studio.
http://scratch.mit.edu/studios/47830/

In a recent workshop, I tried out the idea of compiling a Scratch photobook for the students - http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/10680718/. It was rather fun. But we had to do this over 2 days.
You may also want to try out the pass it along project that some of us did with our students across a few countries  - http://scratch.mit.edu/studios/74573/ - It was a big collaboration and we had great fun as well as learnt a lot from it.

[Dana Fritzinger]

Hi all,

I've been using Scratch for a little over a year with my K-5 students - both in the classroom and after school.

As AiBoon mentioned, The Scratch Cards can be an invaluable resource - here's the link.

The front of the cards shows what you can do and the back of the cards show how to do it.  I've printed a bunch of these cards and keep them easily accessible in my classroom. Hopefully, some additional Scratch cards with the Scratch 2.0 features are in the works.

http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Support/Scratch_Cards

Also available are short Scratch video tutorials for new learners including making your sprite, move, change color, dance, and so much more. Below is a link which includes a collection of clips for both 1.4 and 2.0.

http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Video_Tutorials

[koos de Boer]

Hi  my name is Koos de Boer from The Netherlands and I am a retired Eng. Electr. I work as volunteer on a primary school neareby teaching Scratch 1.4 . I found out that in Ireland there is also a group that encourage the use of Scratch and they have developed a complete set of teaching programs http://scratch.ie/primary/resources. They consist of pdf files and I found the very usefull especially in the beginning.

[Sinead]

Hi folks, 

I am Sinead and I am a mentor at our local CoderDojo.  We have used the Scratch cards as a great starting point but there are some of the children who just cannot figure out from there what to do.  Due to my lack of experience I have not been much help so I am trying to develop skills and knowledge to help guide them in the future.  Also I would like to try and develop a method, using scratch, to help students become more involved in their learning.  Here in Ireland all learning is book based which does not suit a large percentage of children.  My own son is profoundly dyslexic but with a high IQ but he is also dyspraxic - so I would like to make their school books more interactive and engaging while being able to alter the programme to suit the needs of the child.

Looking forward to learning a lot.

Sinead

[Vera-Germaine Adams]

Wonderful share!! You can access the first two lessons and for the remaining lessons you need a passcode which I received immediately on request! Thanks!!

[Robin Ricketts]

Alan, I am planning a similar experience for a Scratch camp and then an after school club in the fall.  My background is quite different and I could use some help in the area of understanding programming comcepts.  I was a second grade teacher for 25 years in a private JK to 12 school before switching to my current position as Academic Technology Coordinator at the same school.  I have plenty of experience in classroom management and planning differentiated activities.  I ran an afterschool Scratch club last year and found that the differentiation part was very important.  I began each session with a short mini-lesson and then challenged the kids to create a project using the concept taught in the lesson.  However, several of the kids dove into Scratch on their own, watching YouTube videos, exploring the Scratch web site and studying the code of other people's projects - all this at home.  As a result, they soon knew far more than I did about Scratch and they became the "teachers," a role they seemed to relish.  I became the supervising adult instead of the instructor.    It didn't bother me, but I have to admit I was a little wistful thinking of my days as a second grade teacher where I truly was the sage on the stage.  In this Scratch club I was definitely not.  It was exciting to see these kids work to learn it on their own.

My point is that you need to be ready to support different levels of Scratch coding ability.  

[Robin Ricketts]

Where does Scratch fit into your curriculum?  I am trying to convince my school that it needs to be part of the curriculum instead of an afterschool extra.

[Robin Ricketts]

I think these sound like great ideas.  I just got back from the Performamatics Workshop in Lowell, Mass.   LInk here.  It was a two day workshop about working collaboratively with another teacher to create a lesson or group of lessons that combine Scratch with another discipline.  The program is modeled on the class offered at University of Mass, Lowell called Sound Thinking in which they combine music and programming.  It was a barrel of fun.  Anyway, combining other subjects brings new meaning to the process of programming.  

[Robin Ricketts]

These studios are very helpful for my planning activities for our Scratch club.  Thank you for sharing.  

[Alan Yorinks]

+Robin Rickets 

Thanks so much for the input. I think we are very much on the same page. It is going to be a challenge for me to let go since I have always been a very hands on person. From listening and talking with experienced folks like you on the forums, my plans (currently) are to limit the amount of lectures that I present to the club. I am going to let the students reactions be my driving force. So, I will lecture on how to use the tool, the scratch web page, and general mechanics, but will introduce a minimal amount of information to get them started programming. I will try not to answer questions directly, but to do 2 things. First, ask the other students if they know the answer, and if not, then try to gently guide the student to the answer. If it is clear that neither technique is working, then I will do a more formal presentation. To say that I will be flying by the seat of my pants is an understatement, but I am preparing formal lessons to have in my back pocket in case I need them.

If you feel I can help with any technical programming issues, please feel free to call on me.

[Afikile Sikwebu]

Hi there, I see this is quite an old discussion but I am interested to know if you are still doing the club.
I am in South Africa and would like to start one at an underprivileged community.
I would like some ideas on how to go about it.

[BDixon]

I am using the projects with my classes in the middle school, not with an after school club.  

Best of luck to you!