I teach a 6th grade class of girls at Dana Hall in Wellesley, MA. We have been working on a Scratch programming unit. For those of you not familiar with Scratch, it was developed at MIT to teach computer programming in a fun visual environment.
There are many resources available for using Scratch in a classroom setting, various educator groups, discussions, etc. However, when I started, I found it hard to find exactly the material I wanted for class in the order I wanted it in and had a lot of questions as a result. What elements of the program should I start the kids off with? What projects make the most sense to start and how long should they need to do them? My class meets twice a week for 40 minutes and they are not given homework, so that makes it hard to embark on very elaborate programs unless I want to devote an entire month or more. I've developed a few projects that give my class a taste for Scratch over the period of a few weeks. Last year the third and final challenge was to design an Anti-Bullying commercial. This year we will integrate Makey Makey kits into Scratch games they develop, but I'm still working on the details.
This year I started screen-casting most of my tutorials and posting them on my class Schoology page, so the students would be able to go back to them if they wanted or share them with their parents. Each new set of skills is matched with a "Challenge" or project they turn in to me. These challenges are designed to take anywhere from 1 - 4 class periods.
Below I've included links to my content for anyone who might be interested. I'll post more as I develop it. Please free to use them if they are helpful. See the Creative Commons license info at the bottom of my page for more info.
Challenge 1 -Drawing with Scratch
Challenge 2 - Name Project
Challenge 3 - Scratch and Makey Makey (Ongoing)
2012 Challenge 3 - Anti-Bullying Commercials
