I have been working on Scratch programming with 3rd through 5th grade. Over the past few months I've posted my Flipped Classroom Scratch Lessons and about creating generative art with Scratch. Next, students studied the basic principles of electrical circuits and designed their own game controllers. I plan on posting some of my favorite schematics soon and will post photos/video of the student's game controllers once they're completed.

It took me about 3 minutes to make this DIY pressure plate switch to use with Makey Makey. The hardest part will probably be securing the wires to the sides, but hole punch through a card could be a simple solution. I'm not sure how this will hold up after days/weeks/months of use, but the cards are very resilient.

Below is a video in which I used three DIY pressure plates as drum triggers to make a simple electronic drum set. I used the free program Soundplant to map audio samples to arrow keys. Soundplant is low latency and works much better than Scratch for audio applications (shown in the last video).

Creating generative art with Scratch is relatively simple: when the green flag is clicked, put the pen down, forever, turn 2 degrees, move ten steps, and if on edge bounce. Click on the green flag and the sprite will glide around the stage drawing nice circular arcs.

You can play around using "change pen color by 10" to create a rainbow pen and adjust line thickness with "change pen size by 1." If you want to experiment with the "stamp" block, use it along with the "change color effect by 25" and "change size by 10" blocks.

Programming an array of squares (what I'm calling "pixels") which change color when webcam motion is detected behind the sprite turned out to be easier than I expected. The code is simple: when the green flag is clicked, forever, set color effect to, video motion on this sprite. In order to align the squares precisely, I added the "go to x y" block, which unfortunately had to be set individually for each square.

After playing with the project, I wanted to increase the change in color. I multiplied the video motion so that the color would change more drastically. The amount of "video motion on this sprite" is calculated as a number between 0 and 100 (it sometimes will register -1 or -2). The color effect shifts the hue of the sprite. A color effect value 100 shifts the hue 180 degrees and a value 200 shifts it 360 degrees. Multiplying the video motion by 2 would allow for the full range of hues, but unfortunately the maximum amount of video motion (100) would result in no visible change in hue (360 degrees... back to the original color). In the end, I decided to use a variable as the multiplier so that I could easily adjust the amount.

You can click here to get to the project on the Scratch website. I have also embedded the project below. Scratch is currently Flash-based and will not work on iOS devices.

This fall I began teaching Scratch programming to 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students and spent lots of valuable class time "presenting lectures" to my students. I quickly realized that Scratch programming would be an ideal subject for flipped teaching. Rather than devote class time to telling my students how to make a cat jump or how to make a bat fly, students could watch the videos at home and then start working and experimenting within the Scratch interface. Class time could then be dedicated to working on projects, answering questions that the students come across, and watching or re-watching the tutorial videos.

A lecture is essentially a non-linear format. While students MAY ask questions or ask for clarification on a topic, I believe that few students are willing to raise their hand and admit that they need something repeated. I believe that this may be especially true of lower-income students. In Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, he writes that when wealthy and middle-class parents take their children to the doctor, they prompt their children by telling them, “if you have any questions, be sure to ask the doctor. This is your opportunity to talk to him about any health problems you’re having...” On the other hand, the children of poor parents feel less entitled to question an authority figure and instead they just accept what the doctor tells without raising concerns or criticisms.

The non-linear format of a YouTube video allows students to pause, rewind, or fast forward their teacher without having to raise their hand. Obviously, it also allows students to "time shift" their lessons and watch them whenever and wherever they would like. Salman Khan talks about this in his TED Talk Let's use video to reinvent education:

They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person. . . . [N]ow they can pause and repeat [me], without feeling like they're wasting my time. If they have to review something that they should have learned a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of years ago, they don't have to be embarrassed and ask [me]. They can just watch those videos. If they're bored, they can go ahead. They can watch it at their own time, at their own pace. And probably the least appreciated aspect of this is the notion that the very first time, the very first time that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, "Do you understand this?" And that's what was happening with the interaction with my cousins before, and now they can just do it in the intimacy of their own room.

Finally, Scratch files are an open format and allow anyone to look at the code behind the project. Recently, I was trying to figure out how to shuffle a list (if you've studied programming, you might call this an "array"). I found a Scratch project titled Randomly Shuffle A List (How To: Fisher-Yates) by user jgatcomb. By clicking the See Inside button, you can learn how another user programmed their work OR, if you're lazy, copy their work using the Backpack feature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBDROODrxD8&list=PLzFQmmaR906KCqGX_i2IysI9XqJervipN