Webinar Overview – Introducing Scratch

Intro

Check out the recording for this  “Techie How To” session by guest presenter Carl Bogardus (on Twitter as @weemooseus) who showed us how he uses Scratch with students to develop a variety of visual and interactive projects and how this can help students with maths and logic as well as developing basic programming skills.

The session

Carl did an excellent job against all the odds – technical issues with audio and uploading slides meant that he presented the session “off the top of his head”. We started with a look at the Scratch

Scratch

homepage and Carl told us a little about how the site works. He then “played” a project developed by one of his former students to show us the sorts of things that can be done. Next Carl showed us how simply the program blocks can be put together, modified and then instantly tested.  As an illustration of how he uses Scratch to develop maths and logic skills Carl built a very small program to move a sprite by inviting suggestions from the group about how to achieve particular effects and then implementing these so that we could see if we were right! The session finished with questions.

Conclusion

Many thanks to Carl for providing a great introduction to an application that could, in my opinion, be useful for developing engaging learning resources as well as for students themselves to use in developing their own skills

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs Serendipity – unconference session so bring along your hot topics and burning issues (what makes you spit with anger or thump a tub with passion) and throw them into the melting pot for the poll to choose our topic in the first ten minutes.

Join us on Thursday June 24th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday June 25th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

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