Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Scratch
A friend today told me about Scratch as a possible fun and simplish move towards that Conrad Wolfram vision of computational math in schools. I'm currently too groggy from post-surgery morphine to dig in and create any teaching material using scratch right now. Has anyone used this for teaching yet?
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There is a Scratch community for educators: http://scratched.media.mit.edu/
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of suggestions for teaching material there, although I haven't had time to look closely at any of them.
There's a fair amount of stuff for younger kids (10-13) and then there are college cs departments using it to study algorithms. Not that much for high school kids. In my mind it would be ideal to start kids off with something like this when they're nine or ten. Use it in the classroom a few hours a week until they get to high school - then getting them to use even more sophisticated tools (Mathematica?) would be much easier. Let them make games! (With plenty of teacher guidance of course.)
ReplyDeleteStill, I guess there is stuff you could do with high school students if you dared to steal some time from the test preparation curriculum. The few examples like this one:
http://scratched.media.mit.edu/sites/default/files/Graphing%20assignment.pdf
are pretty boring. But maybe not boring compared to doing problems from the book.