Inner city urban youth might not be the first thing people think of when they think programmers, although they would be very wrong. The Computer Clubhouse in LA provides a place for inner city youth to play around with different technologies. Entertainment can range from playing Xbox to utilizing a recording studio. The Clubhouse decided to bring on an object oriented programming software named Scratch to see if they could get the youth interested in programming. They did.
Figure 1: Code 'Blocks' from Scratch
(taken from article referenced below)
So what is scratch? Scratch is an object oriented programming software create by The Brainiacs over at MIT to elicit youth interest into programming and then make the learning process easy and fun. Users of the program create a Sprite, an instantiation of a class, and then through stacking 'blocks' which represent lines of code, create sequences that can have the Sprite perform a multitude of fun activities.
The program was ran in the Clubhouse for 18 months. So what did the students learn? Well, first it should be pointed out that they were having so much fun that they weren't even considering it programming. Now what they brought away from the experience was the understanding of some difficult concepts in programming such as Boolean logic, sequential control flow, loops, conditional statements, variables, and random numbers.
I think this is a great program for youth and I am happy to hear of this success story. The best way to teach a student is to make them think they are not in school. By this I am referring to traditional 'boring' school. You need to make learning fun and that is what was done with this program. I would even consider small programming exercises for possible extra credit in one of my math classes.
References:
John, Maloney, Peppler Kylie, Kafai Yasmin, Resnick Michel, and Rusk Natalie. "Programming by Choice: Urban Youth Learning Programming with Scratch." Print.
I agree that you need to make learning fun. I thought the most interesting thing about this article was that the kids didn't think of what they were doing as computer programming. They talked more about it relating to the arts, language arts, and math over computer science and it was the most popular tool they had. So by using Scratch, they're going to realize that those subjects can be fun.
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing better than students who are learning and don't even know it. This article heightened my awareness of how students like to learn. It is possible for learning to be fun instead of tedious and mundane. If executed properly, learning and development tools will enable a learner to be inspired to "think outside the box". Could "boring" school someday become obsolete? With the availability of more tools such as Scratch, I believe it is possible.
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