Resource: ‘ScratchJr’
Availability: As a free app on both Apple and Android products via the App Store, Google Play, Chrome Web Store and Amazon. The app is available in both English and Spanish.
Curriculum Links:
Digital Technologies – Knowledge and Understanding – Digital Systems
Digital Technologies – Processes and Production Skills – Digital Implementation/Creating Solutions
Year Levels: PP-3
Content Descriptors: (ACTDIK001), (ACTDIP003), (ACTDIP011)
General Capabilities: Literacy, Numeracy, ICT Capability, Critical and Creative Thinking.
About this resource:
“Coding is the new literacy! With ScratchJr, young children (ages 5-7) can program their own interactive stories and games. In the process, they learn to solve problems, design projects, and express themselves creatively on the computer” (ScratchJr, 2016).
This app allows Junior Primary students to engage with coding for the first time in a fun, engaging and safe way. The app involves the user creating a customised project, including the coding of character movement. Users are required to make decisions regarding the title, background, theme and characters of their project. They can then use simple coding to make characters move, shrink, grow, speak and hop. The coding is done using a simple progression of coloured tiles, each representing a movement or action for the character to complete.
This app can be used at a base level, purely to get students to understand how to create ordered steps to produce an outcome. This would be done in lower years with high levels of scaffolding and teacher/EA involvement. ScratchJr allows for progression by getting users to creating a whole project independently, designing and implementing more advances algorithms with various steps.
Computational Thinking: ScratchJr requires users to interpret patterns, as well as designing and implementing algorithms. Students experience basic coding, by designing a series of processes. They program a digital device to process data through a series of ordered steps. Users combine simple tasks to produce a more complex outcome.
Preview:
Snapshots:
Links:
https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/scratchjr/id895485086?mt=8
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.scratchjr.android&hl=en