Eileen Malick’ Blog

Mitch Resnick is the Founder of the Lifelong Kindergarten program at the MIT Media Lab, and one of the creators of Scratch.

Scratch is an inherent programming language that makes it easy for children of all ages to create their own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art, and share their creations on the web (Intro to Scratch from ScratchEd). In his TED Talk Mitch discusses the importance in teaching everyone to code, and introduces the new BETA version of Scratch called Scratch 2.0.

SCRATCH was developed by MIT for very young children to be able to program, but has been ear-marked as an elementary school products that is too simplistic for middle and high school students… but not any more!

The inherent SCRATCH programming interface is actually the key to 21st century education on the highest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. SCRATCH’s drag-and-drop blocks resemble MIT App Inventor interfaces for creating apps on Android Phones.

You are not type-type-typing code, you are creating visual structures for complex computer science functions that you can transfer the understanding into other programming languages.

Basic Ideas of Scratch:

• Creating with Scratch
• Learning with Scratch
• Programming with Scratch

ScratchEd was created for Educators to be able to learn how to use Scratch.

Getting started with Scratch:

• Getting Started Guide
• Scratch Cards
• Scratch Tutorial Videos

You can also program physical robots with Scratch!
Robots are mechanical mobile devices with software programming and sensors, and SCRATCH and LEGO WeDos provide both!

A discussion you can have with your students is what makes a robot:

• Sensors
• Movement
• Energy
• Intelligence

Directly plug in the LEGO WeDo USB to the computer with pre-loaded free SCRATCH, and the drag-and-drop robotics components will automatically appear in SCRATCH. If you have a motor raising and lowering, you need to put an interface on the screen to explain what is happening, and if the interface is interactive, we are hitting the core-level of robotics understanding that originally was going over student’s heads with LEGO Mindstorm NXTs because the software-hardware-interaction was not immediate. The robotic LEGO WeDo components that work in SCRATCH are a Distance Sensor, The Tilt Sensor, and a Rotating Motor.

My Blog Post about Scratch-ing the LEGO WeDo

The combination of elementary SCRATCH and elementary LEGO WeDo can tap the interest of all students from the elementary all the way to the high school level.

UPDATE: Presenting SCRATCHing to the 21st Century at the DEN VirtCon 2012 with a special DEN VirtCon Scratch Gallery

SCRATCHing to the 21st Century Presentation Slide

The words “chemistry” and “polymers” strike fear into the hearts of high school students, so when the challenge presented itself to create an innovative week-long summer chemistry camp for elementary school children, Pam Yates and I had decided to “go hard or go home (to Atlee High School where we are science teachers)” to create the first pilot of it’s kind to see if very young children can understand a complex chemistry subject. Here are the overviewed activities of our camp:

Polymers

A [poly ("many") + mer ("parts")] is any material made from repeating parts of a simple piece of matter. There is an award-winning video called “A World Without Polymers? by Yvonne Choo” explaining a world without polymers and plastics.

Students are given time to reflect in their journals what the world would be like without polymers and describe the two types of polymers, natural and synthetic (plastics) polymers.

Students created polymer structures out of paper clips – linear, branched, and cross-linked and from the paper-clip structures learned how there structures make plastic properties such as flexibility and strength.

DNA

DNA is a cross-linked polymer structure that is found in all living things. Students used soap, salt, and rubbing alcohol to extract DNA from strawberries they mashed in a plastic bag.

Dawn of Plastics

Rubber from trees was mass-produced at the height of World War II. Experimentation of plastic compounds created Silly Putty (from Silicon), synthetic dyes, and Post-it notes. Students brought in a ball as homework to compare their properties. We also created gel balls (“spit balls”) and bouncy balls from kits where you add water to dehydrated polymers.

Code-Cracking the Recycle Codes

As homework students had to locate the recycle codes on plastics at home and bring it in to pair-share the next day.

http://www.projectgreenbag.com/pgbadmin/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/recycle_codes.gif

A good breakdown of what the 1 – 7 codes is “What Do Recycling Symbols on Plastics Mean? by the Daily Green.” We also discussed why our local recycling centers only accept certain codes (only 1 and 2). We talked about The Big Cleanup with Discovery Education featuring Philippe Cousteau, learning how plastic affects our waterways and how we can take action to protect our oceans.

Recycling Polystyrene Pellets (Styrofoam Packing Peanuts)

When Styrofoam is added to acetone (nail polish remover) it seems to disappear but becomes a melted type of plastic putty that you can mold into shapes that become hard plastic figures when dry.

Bioplastics

Bioplastics remove the necessity of using petroleum (a non-renewable resource) in creating synthetic plastics. We used whipping cream to create a bioplastic, and cornstarch can create a bioplastic. Only ingredient of cornstarch… Corn! We also created bioslime and puffy stickers using a biopaint. We also created home-made gummy candies using a kit that extracted the main polymer compounds from guar gum and seaweed.

Spider Silk and Kevlar

The new Spiderman movie was released the same time as our camp, so we discussed how modern scientists were trying to create materials as strong as spider silk. We had an officer bring in 3 types of “bullet-resistant” (as opposed to “bullet-proof”) equipment to discuss how Kevlar (a synthetic polymer) helps protect law enforcement.

Reflection

The use of journals after every activity/lab was essential for students to be able to incorporate what they have learned and be able to remember the objectives of the camp whenever they open their journals. Also Discovery Education media was essential in presenting all subjects in this camp.

I have been Scratch-ing with LEGO WeDo kits, and my high school level students absolutely love it!
The LEGO® Education WeDo™ robotics kit is normally ear-marked as an elementary school product, and Scratch was developed by MIT for young children to be able to program, but the combination of the two has tapped the interest of my elementary school daughter, my middle school son, and my Computer Science students at the high school level.
Link: http://info.scratch.mit.edu/WeDo

LEGO WeDo USB and the ScratchEd Screen

An example program using LEGO WeDo with Scratch called updownduck.

But when you download the Source Code and view it within Scratch, you can understand the purpose of the programming.

Source Code for updownduck in Scratch.

Distance Sensor + Sprite

Motor + Scratch

These intro projects give easy-to-follow LEGO directions within the Scratch window.

My favorite section is the WeDo Starter Projects that provide downloadable Scratch files to utilize the Distance Sensor, The Tilt Sensor, and the Motor. We modified the motor project to lift a platform of LEGO Men provided from the WeDo kit. Our challenge was to create a way to make sure the platform stops at a safe level without knocking off the LEGO men.

Complex projects were created at the MIT Lab and you can download the Scratch Files:

• Submarine Rescue – interactive adventure
• Balancing Robot – I wish they would post the LEGO designs so we can build the same bot
• King Duck vs. Fatman Protagonist -interactive balancing and storytelling
• Caterpillar Love Story – AWESOME storytelling
• Skiing Moose Ferris Wheel – I wish they would post the LEGO designs for the arm-swinging moose

Many of these projects require teachers or upper-level students to build the components, but once built the storytelling capabilities are incredible.

The robotic LEGO WeDo components that work in Scratch are a Distance Sensor, The Tilt Sensor, and a rotating Motor. The new Science Standards of Learning in Virginia indicate students must have an understanding of probeware, sensor, and accumulate data. The LEGO WeDo components also give numerical indicators on the Scratch Screen of distances and tilt values that can be transferred into authentic data. When the distance sensor shows a value of 2, students can measure with a ruler the distance and chart the values. When the tilt sensor shows a value of 3, students can determine how many degrees equal a value of 3.

UPDATE: This Project has won a Governor of Virginia COVITS Award!

Innovative Use of Technology in Education

Winner: Atlee High School
For: Scratch and LEGO WeDo for High School

UPDATE ABOVE: Presenting SCRATCHing to the 21st Century at the DEN VirtCon 2012 with a special DEN VirtCon Scratch Gallery

SCRATCHing to the 21st Century Presentation Slide