Getting Unstuck: Exploring Scratch with other Educators
Getting Unstuck is a 10 day exploration from the Creative Computing Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
"Getting Unstuck is a summer learning experience for teachers who want to learn more about supporting creative work with the Scratch programming language.
Every day, you’ll get an email with a small, creative programming prompt, designed to help you explore different computational concepts and debugging strategies in Scratch. "
|
|
What We've Been Making
We are on day 5 with the Getting Unstuck challenges, and we wanted to share some of the project ideas we've been exploring so far! Especially since we are trying out incorporating a virtual Makey Makey into some of our Scratch projects!
Day 2: Control a Sprite with Key Presses
For this project, the challenge was to control a sprite with key presses. Colleen, our head of digital content, decided to create an animation inside Scratch because her daughter loves to make animations in Scratch (in fact lots of kids love making animations in Scratch!) Colleen also wanted to make it so you could easily see a way to transfer this idea of using Makey Makey to explore living Science models in the classroom!
For this project, you could hook up Makey Makey space bar to dirt and actually physically pour water into a glass (Makey Makey down arrow) to make this digital flower grow!
Day 3: Create a project where two sprites are doing something different at the same time.
This is Scratch project is also going to be a project for our maker series classes which will focus on coding and crafting your own alarm system with Makey Makey. This project shows how to have an alarm set to go off only when the space key is *NOT* pressed.
Once you hit the green flag, an alarm will sound if you are *NOT* pressing on the spacebar. (See makeymakey.com/howto for the guide to hooking up your Makey Makey and alarm invention soon.)
Colleen remixed Jay's project to help with teaching students how to create an alarm system for the third challenge of the "Getting Unstuck" project ideas!
Day Four: Broadcast Messages
This project is a virtual Makey Makey example of an alarm that will sound only while the up arrow is pressed, and will also be featured in an upcoming activity for our maker series.
Press the green flag and then hold down the "up arrow" to sound the alarm!
What the Community is Making
It's pretty amazing to see how such simple prompts lead to elegant explorations of programming! You have to check out all the great Scratch projects teachers have made so far in the Getting Unstuck Studios!
We are having a blast creating Scratch projects and being a part of the Getting Unstuck community! Hope you will join us for the last half of the adventure!
