Scratch is great, especially if you have an elementary school team – 4^th & 5^th graders.  It is written for that age group.  Even my daughter, who is six loved doing the Scratch programming cards. 

 

Our elementary school is starting an FLL team for the first time.   Because we have more applicants than team spots, we will also have a club for all who applied, which will meet more leisurely after tournaments are over.  However, to pick the children for the team, I ran a summer fun programming challenge to teach the kids the concept of programming.  The challenge took place all via email over the summer and we used Scratch.   Weekly assignments I sent out stepped them through the Fish project at redware.com  - http://www.redware.com/scratch/fish.html.   I tested them on my 9 year old son first before I emailed them out.   Then, I gave them a few bonus projects along the way.  They seem to have a lot of fun.  Many of them seemed “Wow’d” that they could write something like that all by themselves.   All done through email.  I get to meet most of them on Wednesday at our first FLL meeting.   It is amazing what kids can do!

 

Wendy Bretton

 

 

Interesting looking site.

I found this game programming toolkit from MIT similar to how NXTs program and perhaps a good way for teams to practice their programming skills without a NXT handy. 

 

http://scratch.mit.edu – I made a few video tutorials about how easy it is to use:

 

http://www.bitshop.com/Blogs/tabid/95/EntryId/42/Scratch1.aspx

http://www.bitshop.com/Blogs/tabid/95/EntryId/43/Scratch2.aspx

http://www.bitshop.com/Blogs/tabid/95/EntryId/44/Scratch3.aspx

 

It’s not NXT, but it conveys the logic like NXT IMHO and kids can play with it at home without needing a NXT kit.  It supports movement, direction change, bump sensing, etc.  It’s all in the context of making games, but many of the programming logic is set up almost identical.

 

 

 

______________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________ To UNSUBSCRIBE or CHANGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTION, please visit https://listserv.jmu.edu/archives/vadcfll-l.html and select "Join or leave the list". If you want to join the VADCFLL-ADMIN-L mailing list - to which FLL administrative announcements will be distributed - visit https://listserv.jmu.edu/archives/vadcfll-admin-l.html and select "Join or leave the list".

______________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________ To UNSUBSCRIBE or CHANGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTION, please visit https://listserv.jmu.edu/archives/vadcfll-l.html and select "Join or leave the list". If you want to join the VADCFLL-ADMIN-L mailing list - to which FLL administrative announcements will be distributed - visit https://listserv.jmu.edu/archives/vadcfll-admin-l.html and select "Join or leave the list".