Samorost, Twitter & Scratch – Part 2

I traditionally taught my 90-minute introduction to Scratch session in a linear, step-by-step fashion but that proved slightly boring, even with mini-challenges interspersed throughout the session. The approach seemed to divorce its implementation from anything the students considered useful and certainly did not reflect the exploratory way they make sense of new technologies outside school. How many students (or adults) open up the mobile phone manual, for example, commence at step one and work systematically through the instructions until they are finally in a position to attempt sending a text message to their friends?

I decided therefore to adopt a different approach, namely giving the group a complete set of Scratch project instructions that drove a simple storytelling programme. This and other projects are easily available to use and download from within the Scratch interface. The students were then asked to make sense of it by deconstructing it, testing it with other variables and controls and then sharing their findings as a group. Here is the initial ‘Bowl of Memories.’

Here is the initial script of instructions they were given to explore.

The beauty of using this far from ground-breaking approach is in its simplicity. Students play to learn and make sense of the instructions, and in so doing stimulate their own ‘how?’ and ‘what if?’ questions and hypotheses. They quickly realise that an exploratory approach offers a satisfying freedom only in return for a clear understanding and application of fair-testing procedures that they thought were confined to a Year Six Science SATs paper. In the words of one bright spark:

Change too many things at once and you are stuffed because you don’t know what does what!

The acid test as to whether their exploration, discussion and deliberation had been effective was in the tweaking of the Scratch instructions to present Samorost writing in an engaging way. Like all good software, Scratch had to fade into the background and let the students’ own creativity come to the fore.

Using the principles from our shared writing across schools and Twitter, students created their own short pieces. These were then recorded using the built-in sound recorder function in Scratch and replaced in the script. New sprites (characters) were placed onto a suitable Samorost screenshot stage (background) imported for the purpose. The hacked code was copied across to the new sprites and the obsolete sprites deleted. The programme was tested to see how it worked. Finally we published the Samorost Scratch drafts to our gallery on the Scratch site to encourage peer review and to allow it to be downloaded at school or home. These were only first drafts after all and we all agreed that they needed a revisit to polish them up.

We never did shine the output into gems but it didn’t really matter as decent learning potential had already been squeezed out. As a teacher, this Samorost-Scratch marriage was perfect, a bundle of motivation, learning and draft writing, the online results of which could be reused as foundations for further development for both the original students and for others who might build on their work. Who would have thought that such simplicity could be a platform for students as authentic prosumers? Who would have thought I could have had so much fun trying something new for a change

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