I've been organizing a national informatics contest for students under 20 for a couple of years, and heard about Scratch last summer. After checking it, I found it really useful for introducing programming to kids, and I'm now enthusiastic to use it as a part of our contest in the under-12 and under-15 divisions next summer.
While running Scratch courses and introducing it to the elementary and primary schools here, I'm thinking about the way in which Scratch missions can be formed into a competition. The tough thing is that I have to find something that can be "graded".
The idea I have currently in mind is providing the contestants with the sprites and costumes that are needed for a specific task (e.g. a game), and explaining the rules of the game -- maybe providing a working applet to know exactly what the task is about. What the contestants have to do is providing the scripts for doing the specified tasks, assigning a specific grade for each part of the mission.
Do you have any ideas for making a better competition?
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That's a great question.
Here is one idea for a competition: have contestants divided in teams. Propose a project no one has ever done in Scratch and ask the different teams to implement it.
At the end, all of them will have different solutions for the same problem which all of them could learn from.
In some ways, that's how a group of people implemented the first Tetris in Scratch. All of them had a clear idea of what the challenge was going to be but no one knew if it was going to be possible to implement it. Different people contributed different parts of the project.
It ends up being like in the real world where people have to solve a problem no one else has solved before which I think it's quite rewarding.
The challenge could be defined by the interests of your participants. If they are into video games you could figure out what is their favorite video game and ask them to implement it in Scratch, or perhaps combine different features of different video games. If people are more into art you could challenge them to combine different artistic mediums into making a piece of electronic art that expresses X or Y.
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I have learn a lot in this forum...
I am designning a Scratch course for grade-6 kids in primary school...(I come from Taipei,Taiwan)
thx for sharing those great ideas that very helpful for me~~
Last edited by ccysm (2008-01-03 20:02:06)
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