Middle School Computers Students Work With Scratch

For this second semester of middle school computers my goal is to get the kids both comfortable and excited about the process of programming. They each did a web page last semester so learned HTML and CSS coding. That process was fun for them (albeit a little frustrating) in that they got to see how coding can give immediate results. I think they also enjoyed getting creative with images and gifs.

This semester we are starting our programming adventure by using Scratch, a programming platform created by professors at MIT.
It involves building interactive collages, games, and videos by putting together blocks of code that have already been programmed to perform certain tasks. The benefit of learning this program is that it provides a basic understanding of how code fits together to make something happen. Scratch is also a community in that anyone can upload their projects to the Scratch website to share with others.

Our first project was the About Me project. Each student wrote down three things about themselves and then programmed an interactive collage to share that information. Here are the links to their projects which were uploaded to the Scratch community website:

Peter
Adam
Aria
Brian
Adriana

For the second project each student created a dance party and got to select whatever music they wanted:

Peter
Adam
Aria
Brian
Adriana
Eric

I'm looking forward to our next project, an arts themed interactive collage where they can do just about anything that has to do with the arts.