For a course on teaching language arts, our final project was to create a fictional narrative on a digital platform – like a video or animation. After considering platforms like toontastic, which are easy to use but limit your creativity, I decided to take the plunge and try to use scratch for the story. The process was tedious, and the results are still not that polished. But the story below highlights the potential for scratch-based animated books that (with appropriate pauses and questions built in) could be used for “read-alouds” or even guided reading lessons (especially to build fluency).
Two weeks ago, I tried to use scratch (programming) to improve on the color-coded behavior management system in my pre-practicum class. The system currently in place is simple and easy to use; students start out as green (good), and can move to excellent (blue) or to yellow (warning – ineligible for leader responsibilities), orange (loss of recess), and red (parent conference):
However, I wanted to improve on this system by tracking behavior along specific dimensions, and using successful behavior along these specific dimensions (e.g. self-control or cooperation) to create a general color-coded behavioral assessment. To make desired behaviors more concrete and “game-like”, I also wanted to have specific challenges for students to “win”.
The result is an app with an opening screen that looks quite similar to the “analog” version:
But, after clicking on a “card” it becomes clear that:
each color is related to attaining a certain number of “stars”: 5 or 6 = blue, 4 = green, 3 = yellow, 2 = orange, 1 = red, and 0 = gray;
each star corresponds to a specific category of behavior (the categories below can easily be adjusted); and
to get a star, students must complete a challenge.
When students successfully complete a challenge, balloons start streaming to reward them, and (after hitting the “r” key twice) their color coding changes as well.
Check out the live application at the bottom of this post, or click here (for the app on the scratch website), and please leave any comments (especially ideas to improve the app)!
Development notes:
Data management – specifically keeping track of stars as the stars are checked and unchecked – was the most complicated part of programming this application. The program appears to have stretched scratch’s data management capabilities because the program does not come with a file management system as far as I can tell. To get around this limitation, I set up keys that pre-populate the stars to 0 or five, and provide access to lists (arrays) that can be exported to/imported from excel (see the teacher page in the app).
Student names, behavioral categories, and challenges are set up to be easy to customize.
The next version of this tool will include more sound effects (beyond the balloons popping)
Scratch is a really cool tool for educators! building this app made me realize how useful it can be for building animated stories, word sorts, and quizzes.
