Reflection: Scratch, a 21st century learning tool

What is Scratch?
Scratch is an interactive programming environment developed at MIT Media Lab by the Lifelong Kindergarten research group.

How it supports 21st century Learning
According to Learning with Scratch - 21st Century Learning Skills, this environment teaches the users: information and communication skills, thinking and problem solving skills, and interpersonal and self directional skills.

This type of programming environment, a user friendly game design interface, inspires learning in a new and creative way that is attractive to students. In addition to playing an online game, they have the opportunity to actually design and create a game around a particular subject.

My Reflection on Scratch
I think this program is a great tool to use because students have to use a variety of skills to put their game together: they need to build the codes themselves which will require research, planning, knowledge of subject matter, creativity and the possibility of collaboration in team assignments. In the process, as stated by Andreas Monroy-Hernandez and Mitchel Resnick in Empowering Kids to Create and Share Programmable Media, "they not only learn important math and computer science concepts, but they also develop important learning skills: creative thinking, effective communication, critical analysis, systematic experimentation, iterative design, and continual learning".

• Describe how using Scratch with students helps you as a teacher address the ISTE NETS-T Standards 1a:
• promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness.

My reflection above describes how Scratch helps to address Standard 1a however, an additional powerful feature of Scratch that also applies is the user's ability to build on what other users have created. This feature allows the students to use their inventiveness and innovative thinking to either improve on an existing program or take it in a completely new direction while still giving credit to the original designer.

Game Example
Here is a game I found in Scratch called Lost in Chemistry. I'm still practicing my gaming skills so I haven't conquered it yet, however it is an excellent example of how useful Scratch can be in a given content area.

Find a CS0  (If you are social studies use the Next Generation CSO’s)and explain how the SCRATCH project might be evidence of student engagement with understanding of the content presented in the CSO.

Here is an excerpt of the Conceptual Chemistry CSO:
 Students will engage in active inquiries, investigations and hands-on activities for a minimum of 50% of the instructional time to develop conceptual understanding and research laboratory skills as they evaluate the academic requirements and prepare for occupational opportunities in biology, chemistry, engineering, and technology. Safety instruction is integrated into all activities. 

Lost in Chemistry could be used as evidence of student engagement with understanding under the conceptual chemistry CSO in that the goal of the game is to get through 'Chemistry land' without touching anything relating to chemistry thus it reinforces chemistry concepts, chemical formulas and molecules to be memorized, to name a few goals. There are also special chemical weapons that can be used to neutralize certain threats, which strengthens student knowledge of acid/base reactions.