Well, it's almost time for the new school year and I'm really looking forward to it. I was really lucky to spend part of the first week of the summer break at the Scratch at MIT conference at the MIT Media Lab. This was an incredibly inspirational experience and I've spent quite a lot of time since sorting out my ideas and deciding which ideas to pursue first.
I think, like a lot of people at the conference, that the Sensing Our World workshop was inspirational so I intend to use my Sensor Board and Lego WeDo within a Scratch Club with students from my last class who have mastered the basics (and more!) of Scratch. I also have an Arduino set and was told that I can use Scratch 4 Arduino to control it. Perhaps we'll do a bit of Logo (Python Turtle maybe) which might lead onto some more advanced programming later in the year.
As for my new class, I'm very excited to have made a contact with a wonderful educator from Northampton, MA and we are planning to share our students' projects online so that we can tell the other school about our own. I'm looking forward to this as I think my class will be really excited by the idea of sharing with a school in the US. We're going to base it around the 'About Me' project from the Scratch Curriculum Guide.
These are my first steps. So much more still to come...
I think, like a lot of people at the conference, that the Sensing Our World workshop was inspirational so I intend to use my Sensor Board and Lego WeDo within a Scratch Club with students from my last class who have mastered the basics (and more!) of Scratch. I also have an Arduino set and was told that I can use Scratch 4 Arduino to control it. Perhaps we'll do a bit of Logo (Python Turtle maybe) which might lead onto some more advanced programming later in the year.
As for my new class, I'm very excited to have made a contact with a wonderful educator from Northampton, MA and we are planning to share our students' projects online so that we can tell the other school about our own. I'm looking forward to this as I think my class will be really excited by the idea of sharing with a school in the US. We're going to base it around the 'About Me' project from the Scratch Curriculum Guide.
These are my first steps. So much more still to come...