Recently, our school has started getting children introduced to programming at the elementary level through the Code to the Future program. Children can learn many important skills through programming that can be helpful to other subjects. Here is a quick list of beneficial skills that children can acquire while practicing programming. I've been in the classrooms and have seen the great projects our students have worked on. I've always noticed the enthusiasm and teamwork of the students as they complete their projects. One programming language that the children work with here is Scratch and it is has been a big hit.
Scratch is an interactive programming environment created by MIT. The focus of the project was making programming concepts fun and easy for children to learn. This is accomplished using block-based drag and drop programming. Children learn about these concepts by moving items around the screen, waiting for mouse clicks to occur to update items, playing sound effects when certain events happen, and much much more. Children can use Scratch to make little games, animations, or even tell a story.
The Scratch programming environment looks like this:
Scratch is a great programming environment to start children on because it was built with kindergarten level children in mind. The programming environment uses images, bright colors, sounds, and animations to keep children engaged. Scratch is also very accessible. It is web-based, so no extra software needs to be installed and programs are built and ran within any web browser. This means Scratch can run on all types of hardware like desktops, laptops, Chromebooks, iPads, Android-based tablets, and even smartphones.
To get started on a new Scratch project, simply go to the web address blow:
My boss Justin has recently made some good intro Scratch videos. These could be used by both parents and children. He currently has 3 Scratch videos on his YouTube. I'll link to the first video in his Scratch tutorial video series below:
The nice thing about following along with these video tutorials is that you can go back and watch how things are done and you can follow along at your own speed by pausing the video to try the programming steps. Justin has been actively making videos and is taking suggestions for new tutorial content. If there is a concept you would like to see a tutorial made for, just hit him up on his YouTube channel and let him know! His channel can be found here:
Beyond that, some other Scratch programming resources can be found at:
Please pass this post along to anyone that is interested in learning the basics of programming. As always, if you have any questions about Scratch or if your children are working on a program and get stuck, feel free to send me a message and I'll do my best to help out.
Have a great summer of coding!
~ Michael
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