After lunch, a half-group section of Class 1 students happily made their way to Room 24 for a technology lesson. In two parallel lines, the girls sat cross-legged on the royal blue rug and awaited instructions from their teacher.
“Take a big quiet breath!” said Lower School Technology Integrator Jessica Busk as the students settled in. “Do you remember last time when we talked about ‘events’ in code?”
An event, she reminded them, is an action that a program/code responds to. When asked for an example, one girl said an event can make a character walk. “Exactly!” Ms. Busk said. “Today, we’re going to learn some new types of events!”
“Hold your iPad with two hands,” their teacher reminded as she passed out the devices. “Turn the iPad on and open up Scratch Jr.”
To begin, the students selected a background of their choice and chose two characters – a pig and a fairy – from an array of options. “Place the pig on the left and the fairy on the right,” Ms. Busk instructed.
Next it was time to add their code! A blank white space appeared at the bottom of their screens, with six colorful buttons in the left corner. Each button displayed an icon (arrow, person, speaker, etc.) to categorize the events that students could choose from.
Dragging the yellow button to the blank area of her screen, Ms. Busk said, “Let’s add what’s called a bump,” which, in this case, triggered the fairy’s code to run when touched by the other character. Their next selection— a speech bubble—would prompt the fairy to say “Hi.” (With an editable text box, the students could add whatever word or sentence they liked.) She pulled a green button down, with the students following along on their iPads, watching the code fitting together like a puzzle.
They added a few more elements and finished by placing a red button at the end, which tells the code to stop running.
Next, they needed to program the pig. “This is the first time we’ve done two characters! Let’s make the pig walk to the fairy,” Ms. Busk said. After selecting the blue arrow button, several direction choices popped up and the girls dragged the right-facing arrow into their code.
After adding a few more events, Ms. Busk made their creation full screen and announced, “It’s time to test our code!” The girls watched as the scene unfolded before them—exactly as they had intended.
“Your mission for the rest of class,” Ms. Busk said, “is to practice creating characters and backgrounds.” (Within the Scratch Jr. platform, students can also draw their own elements to code.) “One student in the last class made a banana with legs!”
The girls excitedly got to work and a rainbow sunset, mermaid, flower field and theater began to emerge. A few students elected to share their original work on the board, with their friends cheering and laughing at their creativity. “You all should feel so proud!” Ms. Busk remarked.
At the announcement of clean-up, a few groaned. “Don’t worry!” Ms. Busk assured. “We’ll be working on this for a bit.”
In the coming weeks, students will use their coding skills to create their very own video games, with characters and scenes all born from their imaginations. “Next class we’ll start our planning process,” Ms. Busk said. “Think about where you want the video game to take place.” Noting the immense possibilities, she shared that students could choose anywhere—desert, forest or in the snow, for example—and create any character.
Ideas churning, the students packed up their iPads and headed back to their classroom.
