A little experience with scratch and college.

I had the opportunity to college students on business software scratch , which allowed some of them to discover the joys of programming, and suggests to me that this software has great potential! Scratch is developed by a team of MIT, I learned of the existence of this little gem by accident while i was surfing on the English pages of the OLPC , given the public covered by this program and my work, I m ' became interested. Math teacher in college Debre on the island of Reunion, so I waited an opportunity to introduce Scratch to my students.

First contact with Velcro.

In late 2008, the last day of class. The bravest of my sixth graders came in math class, they have two hours on Friday afternoon, it smells like the holidays, I will not knock them out with exercises. Providing I brought two laptops, I propose to work on their machines:

• Old blunderbuss: An old laptop (2000) which is getting old but still holds the road.
• Small swift: a eeepc 701 most recent but less powerful.

These two little monsters are powered by Debian GNU / Linux . VieuxTromblon on, the trio apache / mysql / PHP is purring Mathenpoche 6th network version; students can work with their personal account and track their success. In addition, the hilarious program on the command line arithmetic (in package bsdgames ) is installed on VieuxTromblon.

Arithmetic, mental arithmetic from the command line

An ethernet cable, openssh-server and arithmetic can be used on both machines. Students can practice mental math. Two machines, enough to occupy my four children ... For a little less than an hour. The holidays are really too close, they have worked on networking, and Mathenpoche mental arithmetic during the year, the cup is full. "Pity sir, we do not want more math." I feel he will have to move on. Scratch is installed on VieuxTromblon, let's go! You will find here the final result of the work done with students in an hour. I will try to relate the session.

How did we do?

With four students, one machine on which the software is installed, it took teamwork. I started by showing them the software, the operation thereof and have handled before them for 5 minutes. Specifically, we explored the interface:

The main window of scratch

Left: the list of different blocks of statements. In the middle, or scripts for the characters. At top right, the current scene and the bottom right character list.

Some instructions scratch

Detail of the frame containing the instructions. Each statement type has its own color, and just drag / drop the blocks to build a script.

Part of the script editor

Above, this part of the script editor, note the presence of tabs to change the appearance of the object or to create sounds associated with objects.

After briefly introducing students to the interface, I set up blocks of instruction allowing the kitten to move when you press the directional arrow "up", then the students took the hand, for allow the cat to turn left and right when using the arrows in question. Each student was manipulating the software in turn, I was guiding in the handling of it. Some of them had never used the touchpad and drag and drop is not a very easy practice with it. After the first phase of discovery, we have a cat that is able to walk around on the playground the way the students have seen in action, read and built blocks of instructions:

  Infinite loop (repeat indefinitely)
 Conditional jump: if [condition or action] Then [instruction]
 Statement block move [number of steps]
 Statement block turn angle [oriented] 

It is interesting to note that given the progress of the class in the program (this is the sixth!), Students do not yet have a clear idea of ​​the concept of angle, and even less the notion of oriented angle. Scratch in one immediately sees a concept in action, viewing direction or coordinates of an object and updated immediately. The students are sometimes able to appropriate things so confusing.

Coordinates and direction of an object

Above, we see a small plane pointing in the direction 59 °.

What to do now?

On the proposal of a student, decides to create new character! It will move too. Scratch is distributed with a large image library, we choose among them a dog ... The dog and the cat will continue! We copy the script for the cat that the dog is moving, changing keys (left, move Z, E right). The playfulness begins to appear, faces brighten

After coming in a future post ...