Scratch Visual Programming Language

Scratch is a visual programming language, designed by Professor Mitchel Resnick and developed by MIT Media Lab Lifelong Kindergarten Group with support from Microsoft. Mitchel Resnick created Scratch for the purpose of aiding young people (mainly for ages 8 and up) to learn programming. Scratch is a networked, media-rich programming environment, designed specifically to enhance the development of technological fluency at after-school cares in economically disadvantaged communities. It is currently free, and is used by students, scholars, teachers, and parents to easily create games and provide a stepping stone to the more advanced world of computer programming. It can be used for a range of educational and entertainment constructionist purpose from math and science projects, including simulations and visualizations of experiments, recording lectures with animated presentations, to social sciences animated stories, and interactive art and music. “Scratching “in the language of computer science means to reuse code that can be beneficial and effectively used for other purposes and easily combined, shared and adapted to new scenarios, which is a key feature in Scratch-“remix”, in which users can download and build up on public projects uploaded and developed by other users. It also gives credit to the participant who built on the original work and to the participant who created the original program. Scratch was made popular in the UK through Code Clubs. The use Scratch as the introductory language because of its relative ease to make interesting programmes as well as because skills learnt through Scratch can be applied to other basic programming languages like Python and Java. Source: https://scratch.mit.edu Scratch Scratch is used in a variety of setting, across disciplines, from computer science to language arts to science to visual arts, and across ages from kindergarten to college-and by educators who have varying levels of familiarity with scratch and computational creation. Scratch’s ability to fit into a wide variety of settings attracts a diverse array of teachers. Scratch is a free authoring environment that makes it easy to create interactive media projects, like games, interactive art, and simulation-and then share these creations with others in an online community. Projects are created by adding images and audio and then snapping blocks of instructions together to program the media assets. Since Scratch’s launch in 2007, hundreds of thousands of people (mostly between ages of 8 and 18) have created and shared millions of projects. After eight years, there are more than 7.6 million projects and 37 million comments on projects in dozens of languages from more than 50 countries around the world. But more than being a tool, Scratch represents an approach to learning, like any tool, scratch can be used in a variety of ways in a learning environment. Inspired by constructionist theories of learning, a Scratch approach to learning is that creates opportunities for learners to engage in designing, personalizing, sharing, and reflecting. Through personalizing, learners have opportunities to connect their creative to what they know and what they care about. Through sharing, learners have opportunities to give and receive advice or appreciation, through reflecting, learners have opportunities to step back from their activities and think about their processes and thinking. These four elements –designing, personalizing ,sharing, and reflecting-have served as a checklist for designing learning experiences with scratch, independent of learner age(K-12(high school),college, and beyond),and disciplinary areas(computer science, language arts,mathematics,visual arts ,and more). Creative computing with Scratch Do you want to teach your students to build interactive computational activities to enhance their classroom experience? SCRATCH can be used in all classrooms for all disciplines, and allows students to use creative computing tools to create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art. A Simple Construction of a robot using a Raspberry Pi micro-computer and Scratch Programming language: http://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/robot-antenna/requirements/software Computational Thinking with Scratch: Developing Fluency with Computational Concepts, Practices, and Perspectives a)Computational Concepts As young people design interactive media with Scratch, they engage with a set of computational concepts that are common in many programming languages .We have identified seven concepts ,which are highly useful in a wide range of Scratch projects, and which transfer to other programming (and non programming)contexts: Sequence: identify a series of steps for a task. Loops: running the same sequences multiple times. Parallelism: making things happen at the same time. Events: one thing causing another thing to happen. Conditionals: making decisions based on conditions Operators: support for mathematical and logical expressional Data: storing, retrieving and updating values. b)Computational Practices From interviews and observations of young designers. It was evident that framing computational thinking solely around concepts insufficiently represented other elements of designers’ learning and participation. The next step in articulating our computational thinking framework was to describe the processes of construction, the design practices we saw kids engaging in while creating their projects. Although the young people were interviewed and had adopted a variety of strategies and practices for developing interactive media, four main sets of practices were observed. -Experimenting and iterating: developing a little bit, the trying it out, then developing more. -Testing and debugging: making sure things work-and finding and solving problem when they arise -Reusing and remixing: making something by building on existing projects or ideas. -Abstracting and modularising: exploring connections between the whole and the parts. c)Computational Perspectives In conversation with Scratchers, young designers describe evolving understandings of themselves, their relationship to others, and the technological world around them. This was a surprising and fascinating dimension of participation with Scratch –a dimension not captured by our framing concepts and practices. As the final step in articulating computational thinking framework, the dimension of perspective is added to describe the shifts in perspective that is observed in young people working with Scratch, which includes three elements: -Expressing: realizing that computation is a medium of creation, “I can create.” -Connecting: recognizing the power of creating with ad for others “I can do different things when I have access to others.” -Questioning: feeling empowered to ask questions about the world, “I can (use computation to) ask questions to make sense of (computational things in) the world.” 1A.ERA 2012 Conference paper Scarched.gse.harvard.edu/ct/files/AERA2012.pdf Brennan,K.(2012)Designing with Teachers USC Annenbers Innovation Lab 2Cany,J,Snyder,L.,&Wing,J.M.(2010).Demystifying Computational thinking for non-computer scientists. Unpublished manuscript in progress, referenced in http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~CompThink/resources/TheLinkWing.pdf- 3Google.(n.d).Exploring computational thinking. http://www.google.com/edu/computational-thinking/ 4Wing,J.M.(2008).Computational thinking and thinking about computing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 366(1881),3717-37-25.doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0118. 5Scratched.gse.harvard.edu/resources/computational-thinking-concepts-march-2011-webinar 6ScratchEd http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu_ 7Programming in Scratch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqomOvsYlto 8Scratch Educator Show & Tell Videos https://vimeo.com/groups/scratchedshowandtell_ 9Scratch Curriculum Guide http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/guide 10Scratch Junior http://www.scratchjr.org/teach.html 11Discuss Scratch https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/60012/ 12Scratch in Android App https://learnable.com/courses/android-programming-from-scratch-2855 13Scratch in iOS Apple https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.seasoftcomputing.StartScratch&hl=en Key Words:Scratch,computer science,computational thinking