8.3 Setting Up a Scratch Account
During the first session of your club, members should sign up for their own Scratch account at Scratch.mit.edu, or you can set up student accounts if you have a Teacher Account. It takes one day to get your account approved, so try it a day before and when it is approved you can use it to create students accounts. Otherwise, let them create their own accounts. Make sure that you have installed Scratch beforehand on each computer.
Review of Club Organization
After a few club sessions, revisit the list and discuss if anything needs to be changed. The Next Sessions.
Prepare the agenda (introduction, timing for the activities, show and tell, ending the session). The session will take place once a week (a day will be determined), after school, for two hours. Preview the
pedagogical guide and prepare materials to share with club members.
Session Structure
A session of a coding club is not the same as a regular lesson. A coding club is an after-school activity where learners come together to learn about coding, under the guidance of a teacher facilitator. Teacher and learners decide together what they want to do in the club.
An agenda for a session should look different from a lesson plan. A structure of a 1-hour coding session
could look like in Figure 181.
Figure 182: Structure of a 1-hour coding session
(https://resources.Scratch.mit.edu/www/guides/en/EducatorGuidesAll.pdf)
For example, an activity that helps learners to get familiar with Scratch is to let them create an
animated version of their name.
1. Imagine:
- Demonstrate the first few steps of the tutorial so participants can see how to get started.
- Introduce the theme and let learners share some ideas
2. Create: Support participants as they create projects at their own pace:
- Ask learners a few questions to get started;
- Provide resources;
- Suggest ideas to get started;
- Offer ideas for more things to try out
- Support collaboration:
- When someone gets stuck, connect them to another participant who can help.
- See a great idea? Ask the creator to share with others.
- Encourage experimentation:
- Help participants feel comfortable trying different combinations of blocks and seeing what happens.
- To understand their thought process, you can ask questions like: what are you working on now? Or what are you thinking of trying next?
3. Share: at the end of the session, gather your learners to share and reflect
- Have participants share their project with their neighbours.
- Share some questions they can discuss, such as:
• What do you like the best about the project you made?
• What did you learn?
• What was the hardest part?
• What would you like to improve still?
Help members to add their projects to a shared studio in Scratch. Give them a link to the studio. Then they can click ‘Add Projects’ at the bottom of the page. Ask for volunteers to show their project to the group.
- Award a certificate of participation after every term.
- Organise Intra-school and inter-school competitions.
- Take part in competitions at sector level, district level and online hackathons.
Answering Questions
The main point of teaching is to help students discover answers on their own. This will help students to get more understanding of the concept and build their skills of researching and problem-solving.
Here are different techniques you can use:
- Answering by giving examples. You give an example that would describe a scenario or a story that would help a student discover the answer to the question.
- Answering by asking questions leading to answer. This is a technique that you can use when answer is something simple students can get easily.
- Answering by recommending further research and discovery. This is where you ask students to research and they share ideas later.
- Start a discussion in groups from where an answer can be found
- Point to online/local recourses