Creative Computing with Scratch
About
Creative Computing is a way of approaching teaching and learning coding that encourages the creative and personally meaningful aspects of computing. Researchers and educators from the Harvard Graduate School of Education have created a curriculum guide that is focused on Creative Computing, titled the Creative Computing Curriculum Guide. This guide contains 7 different themed units and involves using the free visual programming language Scratch.
The design of the Creative Computing Curriculum is centred on four main principles:
- Creating: Offer opportunities for learners to engage in designing and making, not just listening, observing, and using.
- Personalising: Offer opportunities for learners to engage in activities that are personally meaningful and relevant.
- Sharing: Offer opportunities for learners to engage in interactions with others as audience, coaches, and co-creators.
- Reflecting: Offer opportunities for learners to review and rethink their creative practices.
Dr Karen Brennan conducted research into how students and teachers used Scratch and her findings from this research also influenced the design of the Creative Computing Curriculum. The main focus of Dr Brennan’s research was understanding how teachers balanced learners’ structure and agency when teaching coding with Scratch.
In this session we will work through some of the lessons in Unit 0 and 1 of the Creative Computing Curriculum Guide together.
Scratch Teacher Accounts
The Creative Computing Curriculum Guide was written before Scratch Teacher Accounts were made available to everyone and consequently the guide does not include examples of how to use Teacher Accounts in your lessons. However, we highly recommend requesting a Teacher Account if you are going to begin using Scratch with your students.
A Teacher Account allows you to manage Classes of students and can make common administrative tasks, for example: setting up accounts and resetting passwords, easier. We will go over some basic functionality of Teacher Accounts in this session. Teacher Accounts in Scratch are relatively new, so there may be changes to the Teacher Account features or new features introduced soon.