Scratch is a visual programming language. Within scratch, you can mix clips of movement, sounds, costumes, and scripts. Simple coding is used to create scratch animations, such as asking the user “What is your name” and taking the information they input and putting it into the next line (e.g. “Hi Jill”). Coding is useful to practice in the educational system for many reasons. For one, coding is used in some upper level Math courses in High School, including Computer Science 11 and 12. Scratch can introduce the concept of coding in a fun and relatively easy way, and demonstrate the interesting outcomes that can result from successful coding.

The games that can be created through scratch can have positive implications on learning in the following subject areas: biology, english, technology, math, and physics. For biology classrooms, games can be created in scratch to introduce students to various classes of animals, for example, and have students appropriately classify these animals into their classes along their journey in the game. In English class, scratch games can help students with story telling. Playing games within scratch can model the effective use of story telling in writing, and creating games in scratch can be hands-on way of actually telling stories in a multimodal way. Scratch also teaches students multiple technological skills, skills that are increasingly important in this day and age. Math and physics can also be applied to scratch games; for example, a person could explore firing a canon at various angles to hit a target, continuously estimating and re-estimating what a successful angle looks like. I am excited to explore scratch in more and more ways in order to incorporate it into my future classrooms.