Project rubrics outline the criteria used to evaluate student work. A Scratch project rubric can be generated by the teacher or together with students. Rubrics are easy to use and helpful:
- Tools for both teaching and assessment.
- In allowing students to become more thoughtful when judging the quality of their own Scratch projects and other Scratch projects.
- In reducing the amount of time spent evaluating student work.
- In allowing teachers to evaluate students of all abilities including students who are gifted and those with learning disabilities.
- In explaining evaluation to students.
(Goodrich, 1997)
Creating a class generated Scratch rubric:
- Get students to check out projects on the Scratch website and identify what qualities made for a good project. It is easy to find the good and bad projects because statistics are kept for each uploaded project. A popular project will have lots of love-its, re-mixes and downloads. See featured Scratch projects at the project share website
- Together with students list some of the characteristics of a good project. For example some of the good project qualities: the project works well, easy to use, easy to understand, creative, fun to play, funny, cool, advanced scripts, cool sprites and backgrounds, creative drawings, and creative stories.
- Use student feedback to create categories for evaluation. For example project design/creativity, user friendliness, programming, backgrounds and sprites.
- Come up with different levels of quality. For example: excellent, good, average and needs more work.
- Create the rubric keeping in mind discussions of common problems and the qualities of good and not so good projects.
- Using the freshly created rubric, chose several projects and evaluate them in groups or as a class.
(Goodrich, 1997)
An example of a class generated Scratch rubric
View PDF version of an example rubric
Project Design/Creativity
Excellent: Project is very creative and clearly demonstrates unique ideas. Well written advanced design.
Good: Creative and has a unique design.
Average: Somewhat creative and unique ideas. Some project design may have been copied from other projects.
Needs more work: Project incomplete.
User friendliness
Excellent: Project is extremely user-friendly.
Good: Project is user friendly and easy to understand.
Average: Project is not so user-friendly; some parts are not easy to understand.
Needs more work: Project is not user friendly. Difficult to understand what it does or how to use it.
Programming (Scripts)
Excellent: Scripts are all working, very well designed and using advanced programming techniques. Student has very good understanding of scripts.
Good: All scripts are working and the student understands all the scripts.
Average: Scripts may have some errors and do not work perfectly. Student does not understand some of the scripts.
Needs more work: Scripts do not work.
Backgrounds and Sprites
Excellent: Are all named properly, and very well designed. They fit together very well making the project look like an advanced design.
Good: Are all named properly and blend nicely together to enhance the project design.
Average: Some have not been named and do not blend well into the project.
Needs more work: They have not been named correctly. They are designed poorly and distract from the project design.
References
Goodrich, H. 1997. Understanding rubrics. Educational Leadership 54 (4): 14-17.