The advanced activities listed below are important as they help to develop advanced thinking skills. These skills, such as problem-solving and decision making are important for both the personal and professional life of students. (Dabbagh, 2005).
Predicting output
Objective: enable students to synthesize all Scratch programming knowledge and skills to predict programming outcomes.
Making predictions is a difficult task. It requires that students have reached an operative level of development(Piaget, 1983) and have an understanding of all the Scratch programming constructs (Kordaki,2012). In order to make predictions students should be able to use abstract thinking for solving problems and have the ability to imagine the outcome of particular actions.
For example:
Dodge ball game:
Black-box activities
Objective: enable students to synthesize all Scratch programming knowledge and skills to formulate code for a particular outcome.
Students are asked to develop the code for a particular output as it runs in the Scratch output window. Like predicting outcome this activity requires higher level skills, like “thinking skills such as reversible thinking, analytical and synthetic thinking, as well as reflection, prediction, hypothesis generation and exploration” ( Kordaki, 2012, p.4).
For example:
The output for the dodge ball game now has two additional components, both extra lives and levels. Looking at the output
students should be able to produce the code.
Dodge ball game:
References
Dabbagh, N. (2005). Pedagogical models for E-Learning: A theory-based design framework. International Journal of Technology in Teaching and Learning, 1(1), pp. 25-44.
Kordaki M.,(2012). Diverse categories of programming learning activities could be performed within Scratch. Procedia -Social and Behavioral Sciences 46, 1162-66.
Piaget, J. (1983). Piaget’s theory. In P. Mussen (ed). Handbook of Child Psychology. 4th edition. Vol. 1. New York: Wiley.