With all the focus on coding in UK schools at the moment, I decided to look into coding for my Year 2’s. I had played arouncd with ‘Scratch’ (great for older children) before and so was really excited to find the free app, ScratchJr – coding for young children.
ScratchJr allows children to create interactive stories and games by snapping together program blocks to make a script that allows characters to speak, move, jump, dance, even vanish. There are a lot more actions to choose from.
Choose from pre-set characters and backgrounds to build up an interactive story. Characters can be adapted in a paint editor. Photos can be inserted and your own voice can be recorded and used.
There is a great video tutorial on the app which gives an overview of all the available functions. Visit the main ScratchJr website and print activity sheets showing how to build simple scenes and actions.
Coding is definitely going to help my students develop multimodal texts which is covered in the Australian curriculum. They will practise sequencing skills, critical thinking, creative design as well as using language in a meaningful way.
ScratchJr is a free iPad app.
An Android version will be released later in 2014
A Web-based version will be released in 2015.
KM 🙂