a Topsy Turvy Scratch project
For what it's worth, I tried to stay true to the assignment and only spent the 20-30 minutes that Carrie recommended. I could see getting carried away with this and playing on it for hours. I will be introducing my children to Scratch this evening. They will have ample opportunity to make their own programs during this upcoming conference week.
I've been thinking a little bit about why the Scratch project didn't "grab" me when it was first assigned. I distinctly remember years ago being very excited to learn Visual Basic. During my three-day class, I will wildly writing down notes on how to apply what I had just learned. After reading "We Can Code It" I think I have figured it out. My interest was strong because I had a problem to solve. I had an idea for how to make our customer information available for all of our technical support staff, customer service reps, and salespeople. I had visions of all of the great reports I could create if I had a really great database. I needed to have a great user interface so that those all of those teams would not be overwhelmed or frustrated by our system. I didn't find anything that was already out there on the market that fit my vision, so I thought I should just make one, or at least find something that was highly customizable. In order to do that, I had to learn how to "talk" to the program. My learning had purpose. I was totally invested in the outcome. Visual Basic was the solution to my problem. With Scratch, I was simply dragging and dropping commands for the sake of dragging and dropping commands. This has been a great lesson! I will need to pique the interest of my students, in every subject, and not just teach a skill simply for the sake of teaching the skill. If they feel that they are solving an important problem, they will be much more invested in the learning and the outcome.
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