Journal 4:Coding (and Consulting) Kid-style with Scratch

Coding (and Consulting) Kid-style with Scratchby Dian Schaffhauser

This article by Dian Schaffehaser focuses on an elementary school teacher Karen Randall who organized service projects for her students, this time the project was to use their consulting and programming knowledge with the free program Scratch to create games for five and six –year- olds kids with severe language and movement disabilities from other school call Bridge View. For this project Mrs. Randall organized her students fron 5th and 6th grade into small group, each group was paired with a student from Bridge View. The teacher from Bridge View send each group with information about each of her students. Mrs. Randall’s students prepared questions to use in their first meeting with the Bridge View’s students in order to collect information that would help them create games that meets the needs and interest of each student. When creating the games Mrs. Randall’s students run into trouble making games that could be played with only one key. After Mrs. Randall’s students were able to solve their problems and finished the games they went back to meet with the Bridge View’s students and show them the games and how to play them.

In what ways was this project beneficial to Mrs. Randall’s students?
By doing this project Mrs. Randall’s students not only learned mathematical and computational ideas but also they learned to research by collect information this information and integrate it in the making the of the games. Also by doing this project students not only learned to collect information they also improved their social skills, interpretation, patience, understanding, and tolerance toward other people that may not have the same abilities as them.

How would I see myself using this program Scratch in my future classroom?
When I read this article I was trying to think on projects that my future students in high school could make in math classes, I couldn’t came up with anything at that moment mostly because this was my first time hearing of this program and reading how teacher had use it before. So, I went to the Scratch webpage and searched for the word “math” and go to the gallery of math projects, many which would be beneficial to my students since they are about topics that are seen in high school math. The programming required for those games is more complex, thus before planning any projects using Scratch I should become proficient in it.