Scratch
Introducing Programming to Preschoolers
Flickr: AngryJulieMonday By Heather Chaplin Since MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten group released Scratch in 2007, kids ages 8 to 13 have built more than 2.2 million animations, games, music, videos and stories using the kid-friendly programming language. Scratch allows kids to snap together graphical blocks of instructions, like Lego bricks, to control sprites—the movable objects that [...]
A Case for Lifelong Kindergarten
Flickr:wwworks Could it be that the best way to learn happens in kindergarten? It’s an intriguing proposition, one that’s being explored at M.I.T. by folks like Mitch Resnick, the creator of the famous computer programming site for beginners called Scratch. Resnick brought up the idea last week at the New York Times’ School for Tomorrow [...]
How Do We Prepare Our Children for What’s Next?
When most of us were deciding what to major in at college, the word Google was not a verb. It wasn’t anywhere close to being conceived at all. Neither was Wikipedia or the iPhone or YouTube. We made decisions about our future employment based on what we knew existed at the time. We would become [...]
Scratch: Teaching the Difference Between Creating and Remixing
The introductory programming language Scratch is on the cusp of having its 2 millionth project uploaded to its website. That’s an impressive number, and one that points not just to the widespread adoption of Scratch by novice programmers, but to the growth of a vibrant community surrounding the programming language along with the stories and [...]
Why Should Fifth Graders Learn to Program?
By Sheena Vaidyanathan “I think I fixed it, can I upload my program?” “Can you test my app?” “I just need to add a help menu.” These are not remarks at a Silicon Valley technology startup, but from an animated conversation in a classroom of 10- and 11-year-olds in the Los Altos School District in [...]
Preventing the Summer Slide with DIY Tech and Science Projects
Continuing our summer slide series, in which we’ve offered ideas on how to keep learners’ math and literacy skills sharpened, we now turn our focus to science and tech-related ideas. The summer months provide a great opportunity for students to work on projects that help extend some of the ideas they might have learned during [...]
5 Tools to Introduce Programming to Kids
There are many tools out there that provide a great introduction to computer science for K-12 students, but here are a few of our favorites.
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