I had the pleasure of participating in a coding workshop using Scratch courtesy of Kids Code Jeunesse (KCJ), a Canadian charity focusing on providing digital skills education to kids, last Thursday. I already knew a bit about Scratch before going into the workshop, at least from a conceptual standpoint. While I was a leader at UNBC’s Active Minds summer camp, one of my friend/coworker ran the Coding camp in which he had the kids in his camp work on Scratch projects that were presented at the end of the week. I saw first hand the excitement with which those kids approached using Scratch, and how proud they were to show off their projects to their peers and parents.
While I had never really used Scratch prior to the workshop, the tutorial that we did with the folks from KCJ ended up being pretty easy for me. While I’m no computer genius, most people in my generation grew up fiddling with computers often and I think that experience really helps. For what it’s worth, I really believe that no generation of teachers is more prepared to learn and teach things like coding – and digital education in general – than the one going though teaching programs right now.
I don’t think I’m quite prepared to bring Scratch into my practicums, as I feel like it’s the sort of thing I would want to have an established class for with a lot of room for error. The last thing I would want is to attempt a coding unit that ends up getting crunched for time in a short practicum. That being said, I can definitely see multiple ways that Scratch will be useful in my future practice. Obviously for any tech education classes it will be a mainstay, but outside of that I think it has a place in many other courses. Of course physics, as much of the coding works with the movement of objects over time which is perfect, and approaching coding as a language can also be very useful for math, chemistry, and any other subject that includes logic problems and sequences. I also think it can be useful in the humanities, especially in arts classes. Many of my friends who did visual arts in high school and wanted to continue that in post-secondary ended up doing much of their education in digital graphic design. While Scratch is not a sophisticated graphic design space, getting used to digital interfaces to create will always be valuable experience. All in all, I can see many uses for Scratch in the future, and I can’t wait to see what other programs and tools show up that will also offer new and fun ways to learn.
