Welcome to the course home page for the fall 2023 OLLI course “Know a Child Who Has an Itch To Learn Programming? Help Them Scratch It!”. The course will meet in Coffey Hall Room 50 (the computer lab) for three Mondays 10:00 - 11:30 starting October 30. Feel free to contact me (mailto:thomas.naps@gmail.com) anytime you have questions or concerns about the course.
Course description from OLLI catalogue: Creating and sharing imaginative artifacts are key components of children’s learning. Yet often children don’t realize these activities are also central to computer programming. Instead they view computers as a gaming platform - a perspective that has negatively impacted the diversity in today’s computing work force. Designed to address these problems, MIT’s Scratch environment has proven successful at engaging children with activities that link their imaginative powers to learning programming fundamentals. Explore how you can introduce children to Scratch’s programming playground.
Depending on the pace we set and your feedback to me, this “plan” is likely to evolve. Shortly before each week’s class, the topic description below will become an active link to the slides that we’ll cover in class.
All the demos are available in this Scratch studio that I’ve created