Regular readers will know I have something of a small obsession with Conway’s Game of Life – the classic “game for no players” based on cellular automata, and so, naturally enough, when I decided that I really had to write my own Scratch program from, err, scratch to sharpen up my skills for teaching children via Code Club, that is what I chose to write – the (not very sophisticated) results can be seen above.
My first conclusion is that Scratch is a truly awful tool for most programming tasks. I know it is not meant to be a general programming tool, but I quickly discovered that it is hobbled even when it comes to doing those things that one assumes, at first glance, it is set up to do – like drawing on the screen. Scratch actually has very, very limited functionality/expressive power when it comes to drawing graphics – being only able to handle pre-provided sprites (as first class objects) and using a pen which marks out one pixel at a time – thus one cannot (at least easily) find a way to draw anything beyond dots and lines on the screen in response to events.
If you run the above program using the Flash player provided by the Scratch site you will probably see one of the big downsides of that as outlines of the old crosses are left on the screen (the Java player does not have this problem but it is very slow in comparison).
From a teaching point of view I also find Scratch’s message-based system less helpful than an imperative GOSUB like approach: the children I work with, after many weeks, are still struggling with the idea that messages should drive actions (probably we should blame their instructor!) – I know this event-based style is more common in the real world, but I think teaching the idea of problem decomposition via subroutines or functions is probably more important educationally.
Yesterday I went to the first London Hackntalk and gave an impromptu (and so unprepared) and brief talk on my thoughts about teaching children to program – my experience with Code Club makes me rather less starry-eyed about mass programming education. There were a few responses from the audience which suggested I had not really got my point – that we would struggle to fully replace an ICT curriculum based on usage skills with one based on programming – as the audience continually suggested ways to get motivated and engaged kids into programming (rather than make it a mass participation thing), but one point that was made by a member of the audience was very acute – given what our children see computers do in games that cost many millions to develop, how realistic is it to expect all or many of them to put lots of effort into toy programs that chug out the sort of graphics you can see above? I think that is a really difficult issue we have to consider when overhauling the curriculum and I am not sure the enthusiasts of radical change (of which I was and still am one) have thought it through fully.
(I did also encourage them to be Code Club instructors and was a bit disappointed to see that I appeared to be the only one – we urgently need to teach more programming and so these problems of the early days of the overhaul should not obscure the need for change.)
Related articles
- Here Come the Coding Girls (antsict.wordpress.com)
- Code Club doubles reach, calls for developers to volunteer (wired.co.uk)
- Coding, Computer Science and iPads – My Current View (antsict.wordpress.com)
- Code Club Crew (stclemcodeclub.wordpress.com)
- First Code Club (stclemcodeclub.wordpress.com)
- Tablets and Apps: How to ensure impact on teaching and learning (1 of 5) – The Big Picture (olliebray.typepad.com)
- The educational potential of computer programming (bobbywhyte.wordpress.com)
- Why Programming is so Hard to Teach (gflint.wordpress.com)
- Teaching Kids to Program Using Scratch and the Kinect (classroom-aid.com)
- cellular automata (cyberleague.wordpress.com)
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 
2 responses to “The Art of Scratch, Code Club and the ICT curriculum”
I agree that there is a need to grab the interest of our youngsters, and that my students will not tolerate scratch’s graphical deficiencies for long. I am trying kodu, and robotics (bigtrak and moway) to grab the attention of those wanting to learn programming basics. … Loving code club, I do something similar at Coding4kids.co.uk … and I am working this into the mainstream curriculum one reluctant teacher at a time.
When you say “those wanting to learn the programming basics” you are begging the question – what about those who are not so keen (or agnostic at best)? This is what concerns me – can we get the balance right between equipping children with the functional skills they need and encouraging some/most to go further? I worry we are staggering between feast and famine.