Scratch-learning about programming

For the last few weeks my Year 8 students have been creating their own animations using Pivot Stickman, a very simple freely available animation software. They have created some really cool little animations. I'm going to up load some of them to this blog over the next few days to showcase them. Now it's time to move on and to me it seemed a logical step to introduce Scratch. Now I'm guessing that the purists will probably say that Scratch is not truly a programming language and I am willing to admit that I have such little idea of programming that I couldn't explain it or defend it at all. But to me and my students that doesn't matter. What does matter is exposing my students to a new learning experience that offers a way to manipulate, create, design and compute. According to the website Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art . Yesterday in my Year 8 IT class we began our journey with Scratch. I'm really excited to see what they will achieve. At this stage we are in the 'sandpit' just playing around with it discovering just what it can do. Over the next few weeks we will use some of the tutorials that have been uploaded to Teachertube and we'll also look at many of the examples that are on the official Scratch website. Can't wait.