Advice, Answers and Observations for Parents and Students Alike
A Great Tutoring Tool
Scratch is a wonderful tool that I’ve slowly been working into more and more tutoring sessions. The educational value of Scratch is in the fact that it is so open-ended and flexible, yet easy to learn, and dare I say, fun to use! It’s applications in learning mathematical concepts, and computer programming techniques are pretty obvious, but I’ve also used Scratch to tutor in other academic areas, such as vocabulary building. A student was having trouble motivating himself to study his assigned words and their definitions, so I encouraged him to create a short scratch “movie” about the vocabulary words he was learning. He created short little colorful animations for each word. Some of the animations had sound. Some even had interactive elements. Just the very act of creating the Scratch program seemed to embed the vocab words into his awareness; and every time he showed his creation to a friend or family member, the concepts were reinforced. I’d call that educational success! With another tutoring student, studying astronomy, we made simple little Scratch game that challenges the player to move the planets into their correct order. This activity sparked the students interest in the “Is Pluto a planet?” question, and she really ended up going far above and beyond the parameters of her original assignment.
Scratch allows students, especially homeschoolers, to approach their assignments in a personal way. For students in a more traditional school environment, Scratch is a great tool for students to use in making dynamic presentations for class, especially considering the ever-growing involvement of computers in classroom learning. For an experienced Scratch user, it can even provide a way of studying for upcoming tests!
Some interesting Scratch projects:
Want to get your child excited about math, art, logical thinking, music, computer programming or just about anything else education-related? Check out scratch.mit.edu.