Park Street Scratch Club

Scratch in Science Presentation – Simple Machine Grade 2

PK — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:50:35 +0000

This year, Mr. Loftstadt allows grade 2 students to use Scratch as an option when presenting their simple machine project. Gabriel made a presentation on lever titled “How to move an elephant”.

Note: You have to click on some of the buttons, and also the level and the guy at the end to advance the presentation, as this is designed to be presented along side a verbal presentation.

Scratch Artists

PK — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 22:43:56 +0000

We want to use Scratch to create art. This handout contains an example script that draw some basic art. Once you have tried that, try doing the challenge and make your own master piece: scratch_artist_1

Ways to Move

PK — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:31:19 +0000

This week, after some casual playing around with movement, we focus on finding a few good ways to make a sprite move around the stage. This handout explains some of the movement concepts.ways_to_move

All About Me, 2011 Version

PK — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:34:30 +0000

We always start our scratch club with a self introduction project. Simple try out all the drawing tools and some of the say blocks to make a little movie (script) to tell us about yourselves!

You can look at the example that I made here.

Update: One of our students, after a few weeks of detail work, made a story about how her mom and dad meet!

Using the Scratch Website for Sharing

PK — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 02:47:49 +0000

Last year we only use our computer’s local harddrive for storing student projects. It was not the idea situation. We tried to get everyone the same laptop each week, but that does not always work. It also make “show-and-tell” very hard to do. These older Windows laptops just do not behave well when trying to use thumbdrives with them quickly. (Only if Scratch would work on iPads…)

This year we are going to put all our student and teacher work on the main Scratch website. However, we are a K-6 school, and we do want some level of control of their online activities. So we have setup a group of school assigned user names for each student. Each student is assigned a username for use during the year. We will need to figure out what to do at the end of this year!

Lego NXT Robot

PK — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:07:53 +0000

First, this is not the type of Lego robots that we will be doing at the Scratch Club — sorry kids! This one is much more advanced, and has a much more difficult to use programming environment. Maybe we’ll start a robot club some other year!

This is from a seminar that I went to before school starts, and got some hands on time with the NXT platform. The Lego parts are nice. The programming tools are actually pretty bad, if you use the supplied NXTg environment. If we were to use this, we probably will use RobotC to do the actual programming.

The robot is drawing a figure 8 on the floor in the video, and you can see it did not completely return to the starting position due to drift on the carpet.

IBM Supercomputer Competes in Jeopardy

PK — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 14:02:22 +0000

IBM built a computer that can play the quiz show Jeopardy! This computer, Watson (named after IBM’s founder) will compete against two champions of the game show this week. This is an opportunity to learn about artificial intelligence — what a computer can and cannot do. The competition will be aired on Feb 14th

Especially for Scratchers, watch this video on how the engineers designed the face and voice of the computer:

Face and Voice of the Watson

General Introduction to Watson

Lesson 10: Are you smarter than a cat?

PK — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 14:34:48 +0000

Last week we lost another week to Boston Snow days!

This week we are doing our own quiz project. The project have Scratch the cat quiz the user about Math or any topic our scratcher chooses. This lesson focuses on interacting with the user via the keyboard, and how to use the decision making (if) blocks.

This lesson is probably the most “computer science” like project that we have done to date. For an advance scratcher, it will be interesting to see if he or she can actually program a script to generate questions and test for answers, instead of hard coding the questions and answers.

You can download the lesson handout here: smarter_than_a_cat

Practical Math Learning for a First Grader

PK — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:49:58 +0000

This is what I love about Scratch. G is programming a hexbug game. He needed to turn his hexbug some angle to move away when hitting a whall. First graders do not know about angles yet. But give him a protractor, explain how to read the protractor, and he is off figuring out the angle values he needs.

A Birthday Card

PK — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 15:51:42 +0000

G made this card for his grand dad’s birthday.

Press the Green Flag to start the project again. When you blow on the computer’s mic, the candle is suppose to go out. But it will not work when view on the web unfortunately. It has to be on a local machine.