Oklahoma Students Reflect on Scratch Projects at Scratch Camp (March 2013)

By Wesley Fryer On March 21, 2013 · · 1 Comment

Today in the last hour of our fourth day of Spring Break “Scratch Camp” in Yukon, Oklahoma, ten of our student participants briefly shared one of their Scratch projects and described how they’d built it using different Scratch blocks. Scratch is a wonderful, FREE software program from MIT which allows students to create games, tell stories, create animations, and make many other kinds of interactive projects. I created a YouTube playlist of the nine videos, if you want to watch them all sequentially. Most of these are less than 2 minutes long. The total play time of the nine videos is 21 minutes, 40 seconds. These are also linked from the “Reflections” page of our Spring 2013 Scratch Camp website.

Here are the titles and links to each video individually, including the direct links (when available) of each project on the Scratch community website. Several are remarkable for the computational thinking and creativity which students exhibited in the game designs. I’ve listed my personal favorites first. The key here, IMHO, is “metacognition,” when the students “think about their thinking” and verbalize their process of creating these projects and the ways they overcame design challenges. That is how you know a student “owns” their learning with Scratch, when they can explain their design and discuss it in detail.

Tomorrow on day 5 of Scratch Camp our students will share their projects and learning with parents in our “Scratch Showcase.” Reporters from The Yukon Review and The Daily Oklahoman (newsok.com) have interviewed Scratch campers the past two days, so hopefully we’ll see some mainstream media coverage of our camp in upcoming days. Please copy and borrow any of the Scratch Camp curriculum materials we’ve collected and are using. Chris Simon and I are planning to lead at least one Scratch Camp in the Oklahoma City area again this summer, and will be announcing that date soon on the website of The Div (our wonderful Scratch Camp sponsor).

Don’t Touch the Cat Scratch Project by Michael