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Scratch Training
What is Scratch?
Scratch is a programming language developed to help students hone their creativity, logical thinking and problem solving skills and most importantly Self Learning Skills. Many students all over the world are having fun with Scratch Programming.
Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, with financial support from the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, Intel Foundation, Nokia, and the MIT Media Lab research consortia.
In 2011, we took the initiative and with help from a volunteer team from Persistent Systems, successfully conducted Scratch training for all 9th standard students. We even conducted a contest to culminate the training program (one of the winner projects was the 'Brick breaker Game').
Our school students learn and enjoy Scratch from 5th up to the 9th classes. This is a compulsory activity for children. Our strong belief is that through this programming activity, the analytical and logical capabilities of students will be greatly enhanced. Not only that, but common problem solving skills of students are greatly enhanced too - which is a very essential real-world skill.
The students will be given grades according to their performance (grades will appear in their report cards), and are given regular projects to do at home and school. We even keep the labs available for interested groups to come to the school on Saturdays for developing group projects.
Download
You can download Scratch from http://www.scratch.mit.edu/
When you download Scratch, its Help Screens, Help Page and Reference Guide also get downloaded. Once you install Scratch successfully, you do not need to be online to see Help.
Reading material
Along with your children please do read this article on Wikipedia. Another good book to read is Mindstorms by Seymour Papert (this book actually inspired us early on).
LearnScratch.org is a website which has videos which show step by step implementation of simple projects. This will help the students understand scratch better.
This is a good art project hosted at MIT.
Plans
Soon, we will upload some of the best projects developed by the current batch of students. If you have awesome projects that the children can do in Scratch, we would be glad to hear about them! We are also working to popularize this programming activity in other schools. We hope to culminate each academic year with a grand inter-school competition of Scratch projects!
Send us a project!
If you have made something interesting which you would like to show us, send it to us by email on scratch at myshala dot com (please replace the at with an @ and the dot by a .)
Enjoy the Scratch Journey with your kids! Here's to hoping to create a smarter, more mathematically oriented and analytical future generation... Happy Scratching! :-)