I have actually used Scratch before. When I was in grades 4-6, back in the late 00s, I was in a district-wide gifted kids program. Once a week, my mom or a parent of one of the other two kids from my school deemed gifted enough for the program would ferry us half an hour into town to the school that housed the program. We had a few computers in the classroom, and, at some point—I can’t quite remember if we always had it or if we got it some time into the program—we started working with Scratch.
I, personally, hated it.
Looking back, though, I hated most things about the gifted kids program—I could probably give a lecture on how not to do a gifted kids program, but that’s a different topic—so it’s highly likely that my complete hatred of even being there in the first place clouded my judgement and made me hate it on principle. After playing with the program again the other day, it truly wasn’t bad, and clearly I learned something about it a decade and a bit ago, because all the controls and everything came back really quickly.
I think one of my main issues I’d had with it back in the day—besides associating it with the dreaded gifted kids program—was that it was on the computer. Back in the 00s, we really hadn’t gotten internet out in Black Creek. The elementary school had internet, sure, but we were never allowed to use it. Some of the more well off families who lived near the elementary school had it. But, for the most part, no one had internet. My family had a giant computer from the 90s that you could play in Microsoft Paint or Mindsweeper or one of the few CD-ROM games, and that was it.
I really had no desire to be on the computer, let alone learn how to code, and, if I’m remembering correctly, time on the classroom computers to do Scratch almost always came at the expense of losing out on orienteering time, where we could have at least been outside and doing something active.
So I think it was more to do with being a rural kid with limited technological access or want of access and a hatred of being in the place where they made us use Scratch that brought on my despise of the program than anything to actually do with Scratch itself.
That being said, Scratch isn’t a bad program. It makes coding easy and accessible, and I can see how it would be appealing to more technologically adept kids. I enjoyed being able to play around with it, and found it amusing that it seems like nothing except maybe the layout has changed about this program in the last decade and a bit. Even after so long of not using it, it was easy for me to pick back up how to use it, which makes me think that kids with no experience would find it fairly simple to figure out.
For my practicum, I’m in a grade 2 class. I think that coding could fit into the ADST part of the curriculum, incorporating that into any subject area. For example, a couple of the subject areas that I will be working with during my practicum are the water cycle and fairytales. A coding program like Scratch could fit into either of those areas, by having the students, probably in partners at this age or as a class on the SmartBoard, create a program that visually shows the water cycle process or one that incorporates a scene from a fairlytale, such as the path Red Ridinghood takes from her house to her grandma’s house, featuring her run in with the wolf.
I don’t think I will be bringing Scratch into any of practicum experiences, unless coding is specifically part of the curriculum that I’m expected to cover. This is purely for personal reasons, as a two hour session of Scratch isn’t enough to ward off all the bad connotations the program still carries for me. I do think it’s definitely a cool program that seems like it would be engaging enough to get kids interested in coding, but I still have trouble wrapping my head around coding being something kids actually want to do. In talking with my coaching teacher and other teachers around the school, this doesn’t seem to be the case for students in Black Creek. The majority seem to still prefer to be outside rather than on the computer, and I think that this should be encouraged. Coding workshops can be great, but I definitely won’t be incorporating them into this practicum. If I’m at a school where using technology is something more students are interested in, then Scratch would definitely be a good tool, but, as it is, I can’t see it being something I’d bring into a practicum at Miracle Beach.
