Programming resources: part 1

Last year, I decided to sponsor a club for the first time and created a video game programming club. After a fair bit of research, I decided to use Scratch for the purpose. While it didn't work on my iPads (a HTML5 version is apparently forthcoming), I was able to use a computer lab in my wing to get students started.

When I started the club, I focused on the basic tutorials in Scratch and my students remixed projects like:

• the dance party introduction to Scratch
• the Pong starter project
• the Maze starter project, and
• the Teens at the Castle project (which focused more on story telling than game design)

Some of the Scratch starter projects

As I continued, however, I decided I wanted a greater variety of games and more help for my students. (I had about 20 showing up each month, and they needed more help putting commands together.) I built a simple webpage for the club and directed students to the Google CS First material on game design. What I liked about the site was that it broke game design into nice small chunks for the students (watch a video, carry out the steps in Scratch, repeat) and offered a nice selection of games types. In the spring, my students worked on the racing game, the platform game, and the escape game, and some students put up their final projects in a class studio.

The Ridgewood Middle School Studio

For a first year attempt, I thought the whole thing worked well. The biggest problem was tracking student work. As far as I know, the Scratch team is still working on teacher accounts (which would give the teacher the ability to enroll a class). So instead, my students log in with their own usernames and passwords, and I attempt to connect us all up by following each other and having students be curators of the studio. It's not a simple system, and it's made harder when students forget passwords. I'd like something like the set up at Code Studio (which I don't use since the robotics course at my school uses the code.org curriculum). 

For this coming year, I'm hoping to have a better system set up for tracking student work and more challenging work for the students who have already done a year in Scratch. More on that (hopefully) in my next post.