Clarke Scratch Club – Year 4 begins

Scratch Club started up again at Clarke. This is the fourth year that I’m running  the Scratch Programming Club after school at the kids’ middle school. The sign up sheets were overflowing with names as usual. I started with just the new members again this year – that seems to work pretty well. It’s becoming more challenging though. About half of the new members had already done some (or a lot) Scratch programming as they’d heard about it from older siblings, at the week-long summer camp run by a local elementary teacher, or even at school. Scratch has been getting a lot of press lately. It was the cover story for the Communications of the ACM magazine this month (my apologies – you need a membership with the Association of Computing Machinery to view the actual article). I also have a very nice crew of high school volunteers (previous Scratch Club members) helping out each week.

On Friday I introduced the new members to the Scratch website.  Since it was the day before Halloween, I encouraged students to work on Halloween projects and upload them. However, it also happens that it’s the birthday of a couple of people in the group. So one of the members (MasterL on Scratch) created this project to wish them a Happy Birthday (Click the image to see the project in action).