I would like to know what type of success have other educators had at using Scratch to teach programming concepts to non-programmers at the college level. I used Scratch for the first five weeks in a class for non-programmers and they enjoyed the experience. I was able to teach them about sprites, sequence, control, iteration and program construction.
A few of the students had brief experience with other programming languages.( By brief I mean they tried to learn a conventional programming language like Java, but dropped out of the class in frustration.) But they took to programming in Scratch. I think it has to do with the visual aspect of the language. Also they did not have to worry about syntax errors caused by typing.
They were able to focus more on the logic of the script. The fact that they could see their script executing on the stage kept them entralled. I am not saying I turned any of them into programmers, but when I used Alice for the last five weeks they were not intimidated because they had learned the basic concepts. They learned that a loop is still a loop in any language. The only difference is the syntax and structure of the language. So how are others doing in this regard?
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Thanks for sharing your experience.
Here are two other people using Scratch.
This one at Harvard:
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1227504.1227388
And this one at the College of NJ:
http://media.www.signal-online.net/media/storage/paper771/news/2007/11/14/News/Kids-And.Adults.Can.scratch.The.Surface.Of.Computer.Programming-3097481.shtml
There are probably more but those are the ones that come to mind.
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For the past two years I've been using Scratch to introduce my students to basics of programming and logic. I teach a sequence of Java programming classes to graduate level educational students at Teachers College, Columbia University.
I usually start the first week playing the RoboRally boardgame with students (see the demo used as a first introduction here: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=ah/prod/roborally)
This gives the students an anchored experience that they can use to collectively discuss how, when playing the game and controlling robots, they have to plan out what their robots are going to do before they actually do it (thus ideas about design-time vs. run-time). There are also ways to turn this into a discussion about how certain sets of instruction together form procedures and are associated with particular instances of robots. We go back and forth between playing (a simplified version of the game) and talking, and try to build confidence, which is so important given how intimidated many of my adult students are of programming.
Then in the following weeks Scratch builds off of the ideas discussed, giving students open-ended opportunities to experiment and play with creating projects/games of their own design. The ease of use of clickable blocks, and the audio-visual libraries (though it’d be nice to have additional libraries), again offers immediate accessibility and appeal.
Finally we transition into Java. Unfortunately this transition, given Java’s steep learning curve, is rather abrupt for the true beginner. Some tools like Kent’s Greenfoot and Blue-J are helpful for visualizing Java, but still if anyone has suggestions I’d love to hear them!
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