Our homeschool/ed children are now teens and college kids. All four know how to create animations, gifs, graphics, games, and websites. They know quite a bit of computer coding now, but it all began with Scratch, a free computer programming course.
Learning with Scratch is somewhat like playing with virtual Legos. It is easy to use and brightly colored. Push a button, or slide over a command, and your creation can sing or move or walk. It looks like this:
The amazingly bright minds at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) created Scratch, and describe it like this:
Scratch is a new programming language …designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.
If you are new to computer programming, don’t worry, you can still teach with Scratch!
I found a free computer programming course for teaching Scratch.
The free program, called Introductory Computing Curriculum Using Scratch, was created by Harvard’s education department. The Educator Guide is 154-pages long and contains full lesson plans over six units of instruction. The Learner’s Workbook is 119 pages, and contains worksheets as well as full instructions on how to go through the units. Each guide is a pdf file.
Here’s how to access the Scratch program:
Download, or access online, the Scratch program here.
Other helpful links:
Kids will want to dig right in , and begin using Scratch right away. They probably won’t need any instructions at all. It’s a very easy-to-understand, and easy-to-use program.
Since we adults like to research, there is plenty of information for teachers: visit the Educators page or Parents page for more information on teaching with Scratch . There’s also a community for educators’ discussions at ScratchEd
If your student is beyond Scratch, check out the other links I’ve collected for free Computer Programming lessons.
[…] free computer programming course is for all ages, from elementary to high school, and is bright and colorful — like learning […]