In one fourth-grade class students had a US state presentation project as one of the last assignments for school this year. I received the okay from the teacher to allow a student to make his presentation using Scratch. He was a Code Club member and I knew he had the programming skill and drive to complete all the requirements for the project using Scratch.
While the rest of the class used Google Slides, he made this great Scratch interactive project to share. He worked hard and I was impressed with the results.
He set the project up like a Chatbot project and used broadcast to change the backdrops. He also asked questions to keep the audience engaged.
I was available to help with the coding, but he worked pretty independently.
I would have liked to see more picture Sprites. We also discussed recording some audio for a portion of the presentation but ran out of time. He made a bibliography backdrop but it didn’t get included in the version we uploaded. Before he presented this to his class, he made some last minute changes that are saved in his account offline and not published.
He has his own Scratch account now and I know he will continue to code and create in middle school. That makes me really proud.
He had a rough end of the year within his classroom and with the dynamics of some of the other students so I was glad to be able to give him some flexibility with this assignment and let him do something he enjoys and show his coding skills.
I would like to think that Scratch would be an acceptable presentation format for other school projects like this. I have been thinking along these lines for a while and now have proof that it can be done and can show teachers what the results look like.
My Code Club Journal 