Using Scratch in Other Areas of the Curriculum

I have been using Scratch for a couple of years now, and while I'm definitely not a pro by any stretch of the imagination, I have found a couple of different ways to incorporate it into other areas of learning. The reason for this is the children I have worked with have always found it very engaging, even if a tad challenging at times (what's wrong with that?!)

One obvious link to computing is mathematics.

Coordinates

Here is a Scratch project I created for a coordinates lesson that I taught with some more able Year 5 children about a year ago. To see inside the project click here.

The idea was to get the children to create a variety of shapes in any of the four quadrants on screen. As you can see from the image below, all the children had to do was change the x and y values in the blue 'motion' blocks. Remember, this was a maths lesson and not a computing lesson. I tried to take away as much as possible from the computing side of things. The most they had to do was know to take away one 'wait' and 'go to...' block to create a triangle (one less side).

The children really enjoyed doing this activity. It was much more interesting and engaging than completing a similar task in their maths books!

But don't worry if you are not too familiar with Scratch at the moment! You will probably find something great to use in your lessons by using the search function on the site. There are lots of clever people within the Scratch community and they have probably already created something special just for you ;)