Teaching Getting Unstuck

Last year I had the amazing opportunity to pilot the Creative Computing Lab’s Getting Unstuck curriculum with a fourth grade class. Our weekly coding sessions is what got me, the classroom teacher, and the students, through the year, honestly.

I started the class off with some introductory Scratch projects in the fall to get them familiar with Scratch online and some of the basics in preparation for starting Getting Unstuck in January. I created a class and Scratch usernames with my Scratch teacher account. The students use Chromebooks and Google Classroom so it was easy to share Scratch studio links, project instructions and GU journals whether we were remote or not.

Our starter projects for the fall were: Trick or Treat, Butterfly Gardens, and a Maze (for #CSEdWeek2020). These are some of my favorite, go to, introductory projects but they are all step-by-step, follow along projects that produce similar results. The creativity is limited and comes with boundaries. Still a great way to introduce Scratch and what you can do with it.

In January we started with the Getting Unstuck “When Clicked” module. I showed the introduction video, went over the design journal and we brainstormed about project ideas. We were going to look at the Inspiration studio next but ran out of time for that session. I met with them once a week for 30-40 minutes. It worked but modules took longer than I anticipated – mostly because the students, generally, wanted more time to work on their projects. At first it was hard to get them to share their unfinished projects in our class studio. I told them to consider them works in progress, or WIP, and that they could indicate that in the directions, notes or title. From my Scratch teacher account, I can’t look at projects unless they have shared them. Putting them in the design studio helps too.

Our first GU studio – so much creative coding!

In February we started the Getting Unstuck “Color Sensing” module. This one went better but the students had an idea of the process – how the journal works, the work flow and expectations. They had some experience sharing and reflecting. I also had a better understanding of the size and scope of projects they could create in the time I was giving them. Some of the students had such big ideas for projects and, as any coder knows, it always takes longer than expected to complete. Most of my students are novice coders but they were able to show so much expression, voice and creativity within this framework that I was happy to give them a little bit more time. I was also glad to see more reflection and more community (commenting and supporting each other) this time around.

Our third and final module was Getting Unstuck “Broadcast” module. I had planned to try the “Random” module as adding randomness to my projects is one of my favorite things, but I realized that my students weren’t ready. They were ready for broadcast and receive. One student had needed it for an earlier project. The students did a good job with this difficult concept and the GU unplugged activity really helped. The students had improved so much. They were seeing their own perseverance and growth (and writing about it in their journal) and were really enjoying giving and getting comments and especially the coding!

Commenting within a supportive community

That’s a quick overview of my experience. I also supported by the creators of the curriculum at the Creative Computing Lab and the other teachers piloting the project which was so helpful.

If you want to learn more, there’s a Getting Unstuck launch party! This party will take the form of a Twitter chat, using the #GettingUnstuck hashtag, on August 10 from 6–7pm EDT.

2020 Winter Carnival Remix

I led two coding sessions at the middle school for their Winter Carnival again this year. I had a new collaborating teacher this time and we were in the computer lab on desktops (instead of Chromebooks).  We had a variety of ability levels and grades in attendance.  Some were brand new to Scratch and others were part of the middle school’s code club.  That’s another new thing at the middle school. Some of my former elementary Code Club members started a code club this year that happens once a week during one of their study halls. (Super proud of them for advocating for themselves)

I wanted to offer different projects than last year but projects that would still be interesting to both beginners and more advanced coders.  We settled on Flappy Parrot and Pong.  I am also really interested in Text-to-Speech and Computer Poetry Generation and my collaborating teacher is excited about Makey-Makey devices.  So we offered both of those as well although none of the middle schoolers decided to work on those types of projects.

I set up a studio in my teacher account and added a few starter projects prior to Winter Carnival. During each session, I collected the students’ Scratch usernames to add them as curators.  This didn’t always work out as some were creating accounts on the spot and then never received an email verification.  I think the issue is on our district’s end and not Scratch’s.  I think some students’ emails are locked down more than others.

Toad Dash example Flappy Parrot/Geometry Dash project

Co-teacher’s Flappy Parrot example – gradually gets harder

For those who couldn’t get their new Scratch accounts to work, we downloaded their completed Scratch 3 project to the desktop and uploaded it through my teacher account.  Once their account is activated, they’ll be able to remix it into their own account, if interested.  This is one of those technical issues that you have to work out on the fly.  I also opened the studio to accept projects from anyone temporarily.  It turns out that unconfirmed Scratch accounts can’t “share” projects.  This is not a bad policy.

I was really nervous about coding with the middle schoolers again. I’m not with them on a day-to-day basis to understand what they like. I know a lot of them but I don’t know what they are learning in their code club.  One name on the roster was a student I’d recently seen write Python code in real-time, and in front of an audience, that simulated a ball bouncing. (I know it was rehearsed performance and she had a partner, but still super impressive… Would flappy parrot or my other intro projects interest her?)

The kids were great.  They brought their creativity, enthusiasm and worked hard.  They were kind.  They helped each other and enjoyed themselves.  I had a good time with them and enjoyed seeing what they were interested in. They created impressive projects and were willing to share them with the group.  I made sure there was time at the end of each session to enjoy (play, comment & like) each other’s projects.  All but one were willing to put their “work in progress” out into the world for others to play.  Very impressive and brave for middle school kids.

During the first session, one new-to-Scratch student was looking for inspiration so I helped him add a picture of a bag of Skittles as a Sprite to his project.  I stayed to help him make the Skittles bounce around the screen.  I came back to see he had a bunch of Skittle bags bouncing around the screen.  I asked if he wanted to make a game where you have to avoid the bags of Skittles and offered him the project instructions for Space Junk. Later I showed him how to have the Skittle bags come in at staggered times to simulate increasing levels of difficulty. The longer you stay alive, the more Skittles bags are zooming around after you. Then he wanted to add a coin to collect for a score, or in this case a “Skittle”.

Skittles Escape became one of the more popular games of the day and it was made by a first-time coder.

This game of his, Skittles Escape, garnered much attention in the first session and was remixed a few times in the second session. Well done, first-time Scratcher!

Remixed Skittles Escape projects:

X Escape with Sharks

Doge escapes his Leashes

Asteroid Avoidance

Some other notable projects:

Gem Miner – cool concept game

Racer

 

And this cool take on flappy parrot:

All of the creative projects are in this studio 2020 LMS Winter Carnival. They represent the individuality of the coders who made them.  I hope I can return next year to facilitate creative coding again.

Mazes, the Dark Side

At the last Creative Coders Code Club, I asked my middle schoolers what they wanted to learn or work on next time. One student said a platformer and another was interested in a MAP (multi-artist-project).  While I’m still investigating how to facilitate a MAP with my group, I thought the easiest form of a platformer game would be to learn to code a maze. Mazes can be simple “navigate to the goal and don’t hit the walls”, or complex with levels, bad guys, goals, timers, scoring, (like platformers).

I found a couple of starter projects for mazes.  I liked the one from the Scratch Team (classic example) and from CSFirst.  I looked through and found a couple of other examples of mazes to include as examples.  I also came across a PacMan starter project from MEStech.  PacMan is a nice example of a classic platformer that’s like a maze. And who wouldn’t want to create their own PacMan game?

I’ve always wanted to make a 3d maze but am not interested in learning 3d rendering and the other way I was thinking to make it required too much planning. My spouse gave me the prompt to make a dark maze where you can’t see the whole path. So I spent a while creating a Sprite to look like darkness around a lighted lantern.

I knew I could use a gradient fill from black to alpha 0, but I had trouble creating the size of the lantern light that wouldn’t reveal too much of the path.  My third try worked well but I’ve decided that I am not a fan of the Scratch 3.0 vector tools.

Just the right size of light in the darkness.

I had to change the implementation of wall detection.  I couldn’t use “when touching blue” because my Sprite is supersized. So I changed it to “when orange is touching blue”

I still had areas of the map that were visible beyond the edge of my Sprite.  I thought I could increase the size of the Sprite to 200% to cover it but the maximum I could set the Sprite to was 135%.  Instead, I created two blackout Sprites the appear or hide depending on which quadrant I was in.  I’m pleased with the results although it needs a better map and more levels, etc.  It’s basically still a starter maze…

Today was our club meeting but it was also a snowy day.  School wasn’t canceled locally so we held the club but we only had three members attend.  One adapted my blackout maze idea with his own map and bad guy.

T̴͕̎H̶̥̉E̸͚̅ ̴͎͝M̸̅ͅA̷̮̕Z̶͍̉Ẽ̴͈

Another created his own impossible maze

Maze Thing

And the third tried to do both PacMan and a maze and was frustrated with what he could accomplish.  It was his first time and he spent time just playing with Scratch options (which I totally support – you got to know what is possible before you can create).

PacMan remix

Sometimes I feel 75 minutes once a month is not adequate time or frequency to facilitate the opportunity to play with Scratch, be creative and produce something to share with the group. It makes it tricky to plan lessons that fit a wide range of skills and inspire middle school students.

Fractions to Decimals

I created a Scratch lesson for my 7th grade math class this week. It is a starter project but I wanted the students to have a bit of practice with Scratch before we do a more complex math modeling project in November.

(First a bit of background – I’m student teaching middle school this fall and should have a 5-8 Math teacher certificate by the end of the year.  I’ll be back at my elementary computer lab position after that and I’ll run my code clubs in the winter.  I’m still leading Creative Coders Club at the local public library once a month.)

The 7th graders have been learning about expressions with variables, integers and rational numbers. For this introductory project I had them create a fraction to decimal converter. Have the user give two integers and use division to give back the decimal.

Basic code for project (with spelling errors).

I set up a Scratch teacher account with classes for the each section of 7th grade math then put the class invites into our Google Classroom.  This worked well since we were using Chromebooks.  I’m not sure how students who already have a Scratch account would be able to join our Scratch class, but the students seemed okay with making accounts.  I gave a few suggestions on setting up account names.  The only hiccup we had was when they went back to log in a second time, many went through the class invitation again and then couldn’t log in without setting up a second account. (I hope there is a way to remove those extra accounts.)  Adding a direct link to Scratch in our Google Classroom and giving clearer instructions alleviated this problem.

I set up a studio for each class but I gave them the exact same name.  This confused me later when adding projects to the studio I couldn’t tell which went with which class. Luckily you can easily change studio names.

Rational Number Period 1

Rational Number Period 4

After the first day of working on the project, I decided that I needed more formal assessment of this project so I adapted a rubric from the Scratch Ed one here and set up some test cases for the students to use to test their projects.  Testing is an important part of programming.

Students seems engaged and excited to be working in Scratch. I’m pleased with the turnout of completed projects and quality of the work.  There are some missing instructions and spelling issues but even I spelled denominator wrong in my example and a student had to point this out to me. A number of students came in during study hall to work on their projects.  One student who was new to Scratch and our school just had the biggest smile when he learned about the color and whirl effect options.

New coder excited about Scratch

And one of our struggling students went above and beyond with her project.

Excellent project

One issue I inadvertently avoided was the fact that Scratch will round decimals to two places in say blocks unless they are inside join blocks.  The Scratch Wiki mention of the Offline Decimal Trick  is the only reference I found in support of this feature.  Fortunately my directions were for student to use the join block to join “The answer is ” and the answer.  This allowed the students to see all of the interesting repeating decimals and weird rounding that appears from converting rational numbers into decimals. I didn’t notice this happenstance until I was helping some students finish at the last minute and we took a short cut for the last line and just put the answer in a say block. It took me a while to figure out what was going on.

Without the join block, decimals are rounded to 2 places.

Here is the lesson I designed: Decimal Scratch Project If your students are really new to Scratch it might be advantageous to print the first page in color so the students can see where to find the blocks. (I guess I’ll have to update this when 3.0 is released.)

I wondered if any student would try to divide by zero.   Scratch will return the answer “Infinity” in this case which could lead to an interesting math discussion.

Summer Creative Coding Club

This July I’ve been leading a 4-week coding club at the public library for middle school age students.  It is a 1.5-hour session for up to 12 students. Kathy, the children’s librarian, is my co-leader. She sets up the library space, takes care of the sign-up list, and prints project resources we use, in addition to supporting the students during the sessions.  We worked together during the school year, co-leading Creative Coding Club, which met once a month, and because of its success, we are planning to offer it again this fall.

We have this great space at the public library (although the projector doesn’t have the greatest quality display).

In early June we decided which projects to present during the 4 summer sessions:

1) RockBand/Pong  (both good intro to Scratch or refresher projects)

2) Chatbot  (one of my favorites. We have done this one before but it is very open-ended and worth repeating)

3) Flappy Parrot (a favorite of my 4th-grade code club and one I haven’t done in the library setting)

4) Makey-Makey (piano and cardboard- a great way to end)

Session #1

About a week before our first session World Cup soccer was making news headlines which got me thinking about all the sports-themed Scratch projects my students have made. So I went looking and found a Code Club resource with a soccer theme which Kathy printed. (our Creative Coders is a registered Code Club).  Kathy also had the Scratch Music cards available as well.

I created a class studio Summer #1 and added a remix of the Code Club resources for Beat the Goalie.  It has the assets (Sprites and background) ready to add code blocks following the guide.  I wanted to add an example of a music project, too, so I made this one and coded up the baseball theme “Charge”.

My example music project

I liked the idea of giving the students two options each week. We have both returning Creative Coders and new-to-Scratch coders (plus a long wait list) for our sessions. To start with two projects of varying complexity will provide students with choice.  We hoped this would promote more creativity in their projects.  Plus, the session is longer and there could be time to try both.

For a first meet up, things went well.  There are always technical challenges just getting students on the library Chromebooks and into the Scratch class accounts.  It was also a challenge at the end to get them to stop and share their projects with everyone.  But overall they were engaged, creative and supportive of each other.

The studio filled up with an even mix of music and soccer projects.  Since it was a bit chaotic at the end during the time we wanted everyone to check out each other’s projects, I took some time at the beginning of the session #2 to share the projects from session #1. They seem to enjoy seeing their project displayed on the screen (and me struggle to play their game).

Session #2 

Along with Chatbot, I introduced the Pen blocks and added a couple of examples from Scratch Started Project resources in the Summer #2 studio – this gave them a second choice of projects, which worked well during session #1.

Students are starting to take advantage of the class session studio to look at the examples, remix the resource projects and share their final projects for the group. I finally feel like I am putting some of the features of the Scratch teacher/class account to good use.  Both projects were hits with the students.  Kathy noted it was exciting to see them working so intently on their projects and then be so proud of what they created!  It is why I keep doing this.

Session #3

Coming up! I received a ‘final notice’ email (and saw on Twitter) about Code Club’s Moonhack 2018 project, so I’ve added it as our second option for session #3, although we’ll be coding a few days after the anniversary event.  This will be a new project for me, so it should be fun.