Darphin - Thoughts after our first day with students & CT in games

Thoughts after our first day with students

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about how our lesson went and what implications it has.  I was happy with this as my first experience for teaching Scratch but our students weren’t Scratch literate.  This caused students to focus on learning the language of Scratch instead of on game creation, content knowledge, or being engaged in CT.  This caused me to wonder: do they need to be introduced to the building blocks, the “phonics”, of the Scratch language, so they can use that language to construct something new?  This leads to the not yet answered question of constructionism – to what extend does the teacher “instruct”? As a teacher, I tend to lean toward less instruction. I don’t want to be the voice most often heard. I want to hear student conversations. I think students, both young and old, can do much more than we give them credit for.  Facilitated exploration, discovery, and challenges cause more deep and meaningful experiences.

In contrast, as a child of the whole language reading movement - I’m reluctant to say kids need to discover the “language of scratch”. Once I was taught phonics, I became an avid reader.  I needed to learn how to read before I could read to learn.  I’m reconciling these two ideas with: one needs to know some, but not all, of the language of scratch before they use it for creating an undeveloped concept.  You need to learn to code (to an extent), before you can code to learn.  This is supported in Peppler and Kafai’s article by pointing out imitation is an indispensable aspect of learning in media education.  (2001 p.373)

Motivation is another important factor to consider.  Young students understand that reading is valuable.  They have seen the world it opens: their elders spell secrets to each other, to read a menu, or not to wait until bedtime to be immersed in the hilarious world of Junie B. Jones.  I think our students need to be exposed to the power, the fun, and the language of scratch.  We could increase their motivation by showing them the value of the Scratch platform.  Do you have any specific ideas as to how we could show our audience the value of Scratch?

CT in games

CT was further clarified for me through our article: Collaborative Strategic Board Games as a Site for Distributed Computational Thinking.  It gave me concrete examples of the aspects of CT it addressed: conditional logic, algorithm building, debugging, simulation, and distributed computation.  Not surprisingly it seems debugging and distributed computation are likely the most frequent forms of CT one engages in while learning a new game.  The players work together to figure out a new system.  Conditional logic would help one to win in non-collaborative games.  This could include familiar games like Monopoly.  If _____ buys  _____, then they will have a “monopoly”, unless _____ happens.  What types of CT have you witnessed in well known games?