Scratch Programming Digital Proficiency

Background

With Scratch, you can programme your own interactive stories, games and animations – and share your creations with others in the online community. Scratch is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab and is provided free of charge and completely online (nothing needs to be downloaded).

“I like Scratch better than blogs or social networking sites like Facebook because we’re creating interesting games and projects that are fun to play, watch and download. I don’t like to just talk to other people online, I like to talk about something creative and new”13 year old

“Making games is something I’ve always thought would be fun, but I didn’t want a really complex programming language...I’ve been able to make some amazing games. And the fact that you can share projects so easily makes it even better. Scratch is awesome!”17 year old

Aim

To equip a minimum of 10 young people with new skills by making creative digital content around books and reading.

Young people will create an interactive story, game or animation in Scratch that brings their favourite book, characters or genre to life. The finished projects will encourage other young people or children to read the books to meet the characters for themselves.This workshop will take approx 2 hours

First hour

  • Outline the project using Powerpoint presentation
  • What is Scratch
  • Examples of Scratch
  • Basics – learn the language
  • Have the young people join Scratch- they will need an email address for this.
  • Make the cat dance – online Step by Step intro
  • Explore current games on Scratch when finished.

Second hour

  • Have the young people think about which book/character they’d like to bring to life.
  • Think about how they’d like to do that – game, story etc.
  • Get started!

If the young people haven’t finished their games by the end of the 2 hours you could suggest that they either finish at home and email you the link when they’re finished, or invite them to return to the library the next day to use the public PCs.

Young people will need an email address to set up their own Scratch account and your computers will need full access to the Scratch website. You do not need to download anything to the library’s PCs.