Telling a Story with Scratch: Part I

Sean and I are working with the students on a new Scratch project in which we are pairing students with approximately the same reading level, and assigning them the following tasks:

1. read a story together
2. create a story board from the story
3. create a dialog from the story
4. use the story board and dialog to animate the story in Scratch

The programming goals for this project include:

1. sequencing program instructions
2. event handling ("when green flag clicked", "when I receive [message]")
3. setting initial state of values changed by the program
4. changing state of object values (location, size, color)
5. message passing to control program flow

New vocabulary students will need to use Scratch:

•  motion
•  looks
• control
• set x to
• change x by
• costume
• switch to costume ...
• show
• hide
• wait __ seconds
• when green flag clicked
• broadcast [message]
• when I receive [message]
• scripts
• sprite

The following mathematical concepts are implicitly involved in all Scratch programs:

• positive and negative numbers
• location in a Cartesian coordinate system
• adding positive and negative numbers
• estimating distances in a coordinate plane

In years past I've taken a much more structured approach when using Scratch with students.   This year we are letting the English language learning goals drive the process, and using Scratch as a supporting technology, albeit one with a wealth of learning in itself.