Drumbeat/events/Festival/Barcelona/OpenRaval: Difference between revisions

==== Feedback/report ====

I briefly watched this group, but did not pay extremely close attention. The session began with an overview by Jordi about what Scratch was, was Arduino was, and how kids could begin using Scratch to program Arduino robots like the one in a video hew showed.

In the time allotted for the session, kids began to start building with Scratch codeblocks to create a small animation on their screens. One or two kids were engaged with this task, but not many more than that. Some of the folks from Arduino were also looking on, but they were not involved in teaching or sharing their experiences from what I could tell. Overall, this was a somewhat subdued session.

My sense is that kids learned 1) that programming wioth Scratch is easier than they first thought; 2) BUT that programming in general is slow and somewhat tedious process of trial and error; 3) that making robots move (the hook presented at the beginning of the session) requires A LOT of work--definitely more than could be accomplished in the OpenRaval sessions.

I think this activity needs to provide youth participants with more immediate feedback somehow. I would suggest that some code for Arduino is already written and that kids are offered several options for alteration that allow them to make changes in the robot's behavior. This is an immediately recognizable--and cool--change, which is perhaps more visceral and captivating than the on-screen animation. An interesting alteration would be to build on a session where kids build something with Arduino and then learn via Scratch how to manipulate that in some way that they want. Basically, improvements should focus on increasing 1)immediate and big-impact feedback loops; 2) learning Scratch in the service of making something that the kids want to have happen.