Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Thoughts about an after school Scratch club

If you were going to start an after-school club at an elementary school focusing on exploratory and collaborative learning with Scratch software, what clever name would you give the club so it appeals to both boys and girls in 4th and 5th grades?

Bob Sprankle’s Bit by Bit podcast 84 inspired this question today.The book I tried to cite on this 6 minute audio comment is “Coloring Outside the Lines” by Dr. Roger Shank.

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3 responses to “Thoughts about an after school Scratch club”

  1. Dawn Avatar

    I would love for Drew to participate in such a great program. Will this club only be open to kids in that school district?

  2. Wesley Fryer Avatar

    I don’t see why I couldn’t request that the club be open to out of district kids too?! I am not 100% resolved to do this, but I’m leaning heavily this way– it is something I explored with the principal briefly in August of 2007. I was thinking today it might be setup so kids could submit parent permission forms, and then sign up a week in advance to attend, till the seats in the lab are full. Once per month we could have a show and tell day. At the end of term we could have a show and tell presentation for parents and the school. We’d need to find some kind of web-based sign up form system (preferably more advanced that a Google Form, but maybe that could work) to facilitate this. I think I’ll need to both write up a proposal for the principal, and a request to get the software installed on the lab image and the Scratch site open on the district content filter. (It IS social networking, of course.)

    Let’s talk next week on this. I think the benefits here could be wonderful. More than doing digital storytelling workshops for teachers at the school or morning coffee talks with parents about social media, I think this proposal could have more legs since we’d be directly empowering students to have creative, collaborative, constructive digital experiences that they could extend to their homes since Scratch software is free and cross platform.

  3. Bob Sprankle Avatar

    Wes,

    Thanks so much for the comment and continued conversation! I’ll be thinking about a name for your after school group!

    Bob