Scratch Encore: A Computer Science Curriculum For Students Designed With Students
By Merijke Coenraad, Jen Palmer, Diana Franklin, Donna Eatinger, and David Weintrop
Connecting new topics to students’ interests helps support their learning. Utilizing participatory design to collect ideas and themes, we developed a series of modules for the Scratch Encore curriculum design to align with students’ various cultures and interests.
Learning is enhanced by being able to make connections between one’s interests, culture, and new learning. Seymour Papert, one of the pioneers of computing for children, opens his book Mindstorms with his experiences with gears. Papert explains that as a boy he became obsessed with how gears worked. As he learned mathematics, he made connections between his knowledge of gears and the new concepts he was learning. This led Papert to a universal truth: “anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models.” Education researchers agree and extend Papert’s observations past hobbies to include learners’ community cultures including cultures related to their family heritage and their youth. This means learning in ways that are compatible and analogous to community ways of knowing and seeing yourself, your interests, and your culture represented in the curriculum from which you are learning.
Building on this idea, we created an intermediate computer science curriculum for 5th-8th grade students teaching computer science topics through connections with students’ youth and community cultures. The Scratch Encore curriculum (available at https://www.canonlab.org/scratch-encore) covers computer science concepts such as loops, variables, and functions. It guides students through lessons where they first use a project, then modify that project and, finally, create a project of their own. This process is like a staircase and helps lead students to new understandings. Most importantly, the projects themselves are based off of themes and designs brainstormed and developed by students who could learn from the curriculum.
As we developed our curriculum, we hosted a series of participatory design sessions with students, parents, teachers, and administrators from Chicago, where the curriculum was developed. Participatory design is a design technique that includes the users of a product in its design. The technique aims to bring designers and users together on equal footing to give users a voice in the creation of new tools. In our sessions, participants had the opportunity to share their interests and culture by brainstorming topics that would be of interest to themselves, their children, or their students, and design lessons that could be implemented in the curriculum.
We integrated the ideas into our curriculum and built projects and lessons around the ideas in which real students were interested. The design ideas were integrated into three areas of the curriculum: Module Themes, Create Project Ideas, and Design Elements.
Module Themes
Each module, or set of lessons, in the Scratch Encore curriculum has its own theme. To give teachers flexibility to teach using topics that would be of interest to their students, some modules have three different themes for teachers to choose from. All of the themes can be seen in the pictures below.
The majority of the themes that we used were developed based on the participatory design sessions. For example, the Scratch Basics module in the Youth Culture strand has the theme “communities” based on the communities shared in the design session. In the project, a girl introduces her communities such as her neighborhood, sports, video games, animals, and music. Sometimes, the participants confirmed their interest in ideas that we were already working on. For example, the Events module in the Multicultural strand is an image of an Ofrenda, a part of the celebration of Día de los Muertos. We had already started developing this project, but participants confirmed the topic when they discussed Día de los Muertos in the design sessions.
Create Project Ideas
In each module, students create their own project using the computer science concepts they just learned. We offer some suggestions to help students out if they need an idea. The ideas on the list come directly from the participatory design sessions. For example, students are given the following list when working on the state module:
- Create a project describing your family and/or family culture. Consider including where your ancestors are from, traditions that your family has tied to your culture, and the things important to your family.
- Create a tour of your favorite places or important landmarks in your city. Allow the user to learn by clicking on a map. One idea would be to use a metro map and show landmarks at certain stations.
- Create a game where the player moves through different levels that each have a different background. Consider having the character change size or costume when certain events happen.
These ideas encourage students to think about their cultural heritage, the people around them, and the things they like to do such as playing video games.
Design Elements
Finally, we integrated ideas from the participatory design themes into the curriculum through design elements. This ranged from creating projects focused on the collection of gems and power ups to using a kawaii, or cute, aesthetic.
We also focused on representing diverse students based on race and ethnicity as well as ability because this was important to us and to the participants who came to the design sessions.
To date, Scratch Encore has been used in over 80 classes by over 1100 students. It has introduced a diverse group of students to computer science by focusing themes and design elements on what is important to them. Participatory design has played an integral role in producing materials that are authentic to the students using them. Whether students learn about repetitive loops based on what animation looks like in movies or nested conditionals through knowledge of how color mixing works, Scratch Encore allows youth to make connections between their interests and cultures and computer science concepts.
