The use of Scratch in educational contexts I
- Introducing Scratch to students (different teachers, different ages/students, different approaches?)
- Activities and ideas to explore Scratch (let’s share what is being done and create some more)

Planning the work with Scratch
-  Strategies to organize and support work with Scratch (are there some basic “rules” or anything works ok?)
- The importance of organizing and sharing resources.

In this week we tried to get some ideas on how to introduce Scratch to students in educational contexts as well as find some strategies to explore it with them.

With all the shared contributions, we agreed to the fact that age/grade matters in deciding what to do and how to plan the introduction, but we also identified some common things that could be present in the initial approaches with all students

-          To show a selection of finished projects to motivate students saying that they will get to build their own works (and including diversity in that sharing, so they don’t get a limited idea)

-          To invest time presenting it to students and helping them growing into the skills to control it. Some part of work can be done at home (and involve family) but students must understand the purpose of it in the classroom and see it integrated with other activities and curriculum to value it

With smaller kids more time is needed to explore Scratch in a more free way and more contents will emerge from that exploitation (since they are at the beginning of their learning) and it is also good to engage in activities without computer to learn how to communicate instructions to another person (Scratch Curriculum Guide from MIT has many interesting lesson plans that can help building/adapting strategies)

With older kids (from end of primary school forward, it’s also important that students know that they are learning to programming, so it is important to discuss it with them.

It is important to progress from more simple tasks to more complex ones. It is important to have some tasks and challenges to guide work and those tasks can be related to curriculum subjects When you are, for instance, teaching particular subjects). And it will be important that students get to share their work with others in the class and receive feedbacks from peers and teacher and experts (after publishing online).

Another interesting idea was to put older students to teach younger ones or even students teach teachers and adults in general. There are experiences already done with great results.

Some links were shared to documents and projects that can help teachers build their strategies and after the contribution of one teacher about her interest in educational robotics we tried to leave also some links to works that permit to connect Scratch and robotics as a strategy to enhance STEM education.

Mirta’s sentence alerted us all too a very important question that must be kept in our thoughts: “I think that we, teachers, work under heavy pressure of tests and curriculum agenda and forget that our duty is also to encourage our students to be creative and think ‘out of the box’ “