Scratch projects:
- Can be used by educators to support curricular objectives in academic subjects across the curriculum.
- Can involve the incorporation of more than one subject area of the curriculum.
Subject specific ideas:
Art
Scratch supports the arts by enabling students to create projects that include elements of music, design, drawing, and dance. A virtual museum is a good example of a way to explore Art with Scratch.
A virtual museum is a collection of digital information resources. Essentially a collection of anything that can be put into digital format.
Virtual museums were first used in education as an alternative to written art history reports; they can also used to further students’ knowledge of curricular objectives in academic subjects in addition to art (Keeler, n.d.).
With Scratch students have the ability to make virtual museums even more interesting and interactive, while developing their programming skills. See an example of a virtual museum made in Scratch. Note: You can use templates of completed museum projects and have students re-mix them.
Mathematics
Scratch can be used to support the teaching and learning of the elementary maths curriculum covering areas like algebra, numbers, shapes and space, measures and data. Have students create projects which support concepts, content and skill development; Scratch projects can be used to simulate real world problems. See video of the fraction filler project which is both an example of a mathematics project that supports skill development and an example of real world problem to which fractions can be applied.
Language Arts
In language arts there are many opportunities for improving student writing through the use of Scratch. By creating animations or interactive stories learners can develop their grammar, storytelling and creative writing abilities. Students can also develop their public speaking skills by presenting their animated stories to the entire class.
Students also develop their multimedia skills by drawing characters for their stories, downloading and editing images that they find on the internet, and importing or recording sounds or music for their stories.
To create animation stories students can first build stories using storyboards(sequence of drawings with dialogue or story) and then convert them into animations. With Scratch “say and think commands”, students can easily create written speech bubbles for their story characters. Students can even create interactive stories by using the Scratch “ask command” which prompts users to enter dialogue.
Stories are also a great way to further students knowledge in other curricular areas. See video example of a story created by a 12-year-old boy in Bangalore, who was studying the layers of the earth in school.
Project Examples
There are many examples of subject specific project galleries available on the Scratch website. Just search the site. Below are but a few examples, note you will leave this site when you click on the links below:
Science Projects:
http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/15003
Math Projects:
http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/6423
Best Science (Kids):
http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/36449
Journalism projects:
http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/7512
Interactive Reading Project:
http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/61659
Book Reports and Projects:
http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/9706
Learning Languages:
http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/60538
References
Keeler C.(n.d.). Educational virtual museums developed using powerpoint. Christy Keeler’s Homepage. Retrieved November 3rd, 2012, from:
http://christykeeler.com/EducationalVirtualMuseums.html