Sunday 2 September 2007

SCRATCH - imagine, program, share

Scratch is designed with learning and education in mind. As young people create projects in Scratch, they learn many of the 21st century skills that will be critical to success in the future.
These include:
  • thinking creatively;
  • communicating clearly;
  • analysing systematically;
  • using technologies fluently;
  • collaborating effectively;
  • designing iteratively;
  • learning continuously.

Basic Ingredients of a Scratch Project
Scratch projects are made up of objects called sprites. You can change how a sprite looks by giving it a different costume. You can make a sprite look like a person or a train or a butterfly or anything else. You can use any image as a costume: you can draw an image in the paint editor, import an image from your hard disk, or drag in an image from a website.
You can give instructions to a sprite, telling it to move or play music or react to other sprites. To tell a sprite what to do, you snap together graphic blocks into stacks, called scripts. When you double-click on a script, Scratch runs the blocks from the top of the script to the bottom.
When you are happy with the final piece, you upload it to the Scratch website.

The Collaborative Approach
Any Scratch project can be downloaded from their website. You will be able to see and edit any of the scripts or images involved. This means that you can take someone else's work, change it to suit your needs and then upload another version of the project.

Scratch Website: http://scratch.mit.edu/

1 comment:

G.McStocker said...

Scanned the ICT news there, some great information there. The news bulletin will be good to save as a reference as to what is currently going on. Yacappa, Aidan is brilliant by the way, hope to get all year 8 set up before the end of Sept.