Category Archives: programming

As I have done little in the way of coding and programming (and have never learnt it formally), I am more than  nervous about introducing it into my classes. So reluctant in fact, that I have left this area of study until the last school term for years 7 and 8. Over the last few years a small group of students have been involved in the Games Net project with ACMI. This required them to collaboratively develop a game using Scratch, so I have simply watched them get involved! Most educators suggest starting to program with block coding and as Scratch is free, global and shares so many resources willingly, I am going to start my year 7 and 8 students programming in Scratch, even though the curriculum would suggest that I use more sophisticated coding programs. Some students have already used it in primary school, so hopefully, there are some experienced code crunchers in there!

However, as it is now part of the new Digitech curriculum, I am forced to take it on!! But where to get started???? In the past I have printed off a range of sheets with basic codes that can be used to move the cat sprite. Unfortunately this did not engage the students for long. One of my favourite sites for classroom resources is Tes. There are some wonderful resources shared by teachers – some free, some with a small charge. I went to the Resources tab, keyed in “Scratch” and found some great coding projects to create simple and more complex games. All the ones that I have used are free. I chose some that looked user friendly and engaging for students, downloaded and saved them on the network and printed some on our colour printer.

We started with was the worksheet Scratch by tonymitch. It was free. Students create a simple racing track as a backdrop, add a car sprite and code the car to race around the track.  Students who were more confident with Scratch used their creativity and changed the backdrop etc. Then went on to develop their own games. Beginner students tried some of the projects from this workbook by Nick Rickus (the maze game and frog game). These were more challenging and they had to use code that they had learnt from the racing track game to ensure it worked. (I think this is using the old version of Scratch.)

See games developed in Scratch by some of the year 7 students:

Mac Tank Game was his variation on  a maze game, his racing car game involves 2 players and his maze game

Next time I would use the following resources to introduce Scratch –

• Scratch a free introduction  and
• Print off this booklet of sample code blocks of things that students might want to add to their games

More resources:

1. Scratch Session 1 of 3 – fish tank game which teaches scoring, timer and game over screen
2. Scratch Gamepacks
3. Scratch Workbooks
4. Pacman Challenge

and so much more.

Once students completed their games, they had to share the project online in Scratch, grab the embed code from Scratch and place the games into their blogs.

Impact on students: Students are highly engaged. They love to play each other’s games and test them. They access the games via each other’s blogs. Students who would not normally achieve much in class due to low literacy levels are able to use code and are often become the ‘experts’. Some socially isolated students become the most adept and are highly sought after for their expertise in solving problems that often higher achieving students struggle with.

Further directions

Students will be encouraged to leave positive comments on each other’s blog posts with feedback on what they liked about the game and suggestions for improvements.