Introduction

This introductory course is designed for children aged 7-12 who are beginning to program with Scratch.

The course comprises a series of six lessons with the final two lessons devoted to completing a Scratch project to become part of the class showcase. Each lesson should take about an hour, with children working in pairs and exchanging information with each other. Each lesson consists of a ten minute tutorial session that introduces aspects of Scratch programming and can be delivered by watching a video or by teacher demonstration (preferably with a whiteboard). Students then spend ten minutes exploring the tutorial themes before working on their own projects and ideas.

A selection of sample projects complements the video tutorials alongside further videos illustrating how to build each type of project. The course can be delivered as a weekly ICT session or within a computer club. We provide notes and references to the national curriculum if you are delivering within the classroom in the UK. Parents and self-learners (maybe older than 7) can also use the videos directly to learn Scratch over a couple of hours.

The schedule of learning is as follows:

• Draw a Sprite and Background
• Turtle Graphics
• Moving and Sensing
• Sounds and Graphics
• Variables
• Broadcast and Receive
• Make a Game
• Build a multimedia presentation

The children should be introduced to Scratch as an exciting area of ICT which lets them create their own computer programs which incorporate their own sounds and graphics. Show them the introductory video from MIT and explain that they are going to learn how to be computer programmers. You can demonstrate a variety of sample applications from our collection or download examples from the Scratch website. Try and show a variety of applications to generate interest from everyone in the class. Now you can begin the lesson plan which introduces most of the important aspects of Scratch. The children need some structured guidance at the beginning of each session but should be exploring Scratch or building their own projects for at least half of each session.

The resources and videos that accompany this lesson plan are available on the internet at http://www.redware.com/scratch. Please register if you use this lesson plan at your school or computer club.