Scratch Group for Maryland

The purpose of this group wass to bring together Maryland educators who are interested in using Scratch in a classroom setting to learn new skills, reach diverse students, share best practices, and discover or create the best resources for ourselves and our students.

Check back to see when this group resumes.

Scratch Education Collaborative & Shared Resources

Maryland Public Schools are a part of the Scratch Education Collaborative. More information here,  https://sip.scratch.mit.edu/sec/
Take a look the resources we have shared in our monthly meetups and additional resources for learning scratch.

Typical topics covered:

  1. Jan 27: Scratch Review 101 - A review session on Scratch blocks, how to create teacher accounts, accessing additional features, and integrating Scratch into other programs.

  2. Feb 24: Real-Life Applications of Scratch - Creating Scratch projects that relate to the real world.

  3. Mar 24*: Unplugged Scratch Learning - Using unplugged activities to prepare students to effectively use Scratch.

  4. Apr 28: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Scratch - Learning how to connect Scratch programs with AI.

  5. May 26: Scratch Favorites - An end-of-year review of Scratch's best teaching practices, projects, and goals for the summer.

Prior Highlights:

Looking at unplugged resources and add-ons: Here are some unplugged CS strategies to teach elementary students CT concepts. The unplugged activity was adapted from the CS Unplugged curriculum. We also extended the unplugged activities to other resources available to help students collaborate when coding in an unplugged environment (see the Getting Unstuck curriculum). The second half of the session was dedicated to discussing Scratch add-ons to add music to Scratch projects and the text-to-speech add-on to create AI. You can see all of the projects and add-ons that we discussed in this PowerPoint. A text-to-speech add-on is a great tool for adding interactivity to a project and helping students understand the program if they are still learning how to read.