By Amanda Wilson
Amanda is soon to graduate as an honours student in Computing at Glasgow Caledonian University. Here, she describes work with primary school children to enable them to understand a bit more about computing using the open source Scratch programming language and environment.
For one hour a week over eight weeks I taught Scratch to two classes of primary 4/key stage 2(average age 8 years) children. The purpose of these lessons was mainly to show that Scratch could be used to introduce children to programming as part of their school curriculum. The lessons given were devised by myself and were constructed around the new curriculum for excellence guidelines(being introduced in Scotland this year) as well as some basic programming concepts. The main aim of these lessons was to see if the children would learn from using Scratch as well as seeing how enjoyable the lessons were for the children and to see how the teachers rated the lessons.
At first the teachers were a bit unsure of Scratch, mainly as they have never heard of it before. Both teachers had tried a bit of programming at one point or another, but had never taught any to their respective classes. The children's ICT time in class was used for project research, learning word processing or presentation tools. Taking Scratch into both classes was a new experience for everyone involved. However over the eight weeks the teachers became more sure of it and more comfortable themselves with helping out when the children needed it. The teachers thought it was a great tool to have in the class and saw a lot of potential for it more than other tools they had used previously in school for computing. Both teachers agreed it was far better than other software previously used in schools.
The lessons each week started with me talking to the children about what was happening that day, I would then go over a problem and get the children involved to get them to start thinking about their work that day. For the first couple of lessons which were based around the turtle graphics aspect of Scratch, I took in remote control toys to help demonstrate the ideas we were talking about. Over the 8 lessons we covered sequence, iteration and conditional statements in Scratch. Each lesson was then evaluated by the children after it,so they could tell me how they felt about it. They were given worksheets with a 3 point picture scale, showing sad, OK and happy faces and they were asked to mark down how they had felt about it. They were also asked to write down some words as well which they thought about the lesson - most popular was fun and good. Over the course of the 8 weeks, the general consensus was that the children were happy each week and scores stayed roughly the same for the whole 8 weeks. Lessons were noisy, but not in a bad way if such a thing is possible. The children were excited about the work they were doing and when they completed a task they were only too keen to show off to either me or the teacher. For the last 5-10 minutes of each lesson the children were able to use Scratch and be creative on their own. They modified the scripts they had used in the lesson or made up some new ones and found some great delight in showing their classmates things that they then created. Even the teacher's commented on the fact that the children never had to be told twice to complete anything, the children were motivated in the lessons to just get on with the work. In a way sometimes it felt the lessons were too short, just as everyone was getting into it, it was time to pack up. Well they do say time flies when you are having fun.
Overall this was a great project to work on, getting the chance to go in and try and hopefully show children that there is so much more to computers than going on the internet and having a Bebo page. By showing them that they are able themselves to create their own programs rather than use programs created by others it was worthwhile. The children did learn some programming, by testing them at intervals(week 3 and week 8), their knowledge of Scratch did improve. OK yes, it was only 8 hours of lesson but from that all the children said they wanted to learn more about Scratch, they wanted to create more and learn how to do more with it. The children thought Scratch was great week after week they told me they were having fun using it. Around 10% of the children had downloaded Scratch at home to use. I only managed a couple of basic lessons with turtle graphics and getting them to do a basic animation, but given time I'm sure these children will be capable of much, much more.
The teachers as well were receptive to it towards the end of the project, this is in no way meant as any slander towards the teachers, they were a bit unsure to start with. I later found out though that this was because they were unable to help the children when they were stuck in class and were totally reliant on me helping them. Which I can totally understand now, they are with the children for a whole year and know how best they work, I came in half-way through and sort of take over. I have a new admiration for teachers these days from all the work I have done. I'm proud of the children who I worked with, but also very full of admiration for the teachers who let me come into their class and teach their children something they hadn't heard of or used before. So a big thank you to both schools for taking a chance on me and my project without you it would not have been possible.
Anyway I shall probably still be helping out in the schools next year school year since both schools want to continue using Scratch with their pupils and also want other classes to use it as well. I've started both teachers and children on a new computing adventure which I'll be happy to help them with and move them in the right direction.
