Learning game programming in an interdisciplinary way

01/07/2016 08:45

Students of the 6th grade at the public elementary school E.B.M. Prefeito Reinaldo Weingartner in Palhoça/SC learned to program a game with Scratch. In an interdisciplinary way, the students created games related to content previously discussed in history classes about pre-historic topics . In 12 lessons the students learned basic computing concepts, programming, computational thinking and collaboration.

SCRATCH is a visual programming language and an online community where children can program and share interactive media, such as stories , games and animations with people around the world. Creating with SCRATCH, they learn to think creatively, work collaboratively, and to think in a systematic and logical way. SCRATCH is a freely available open-source software, developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. SCRATCH is a creative learning community present in more than 150 countries with more than 11 million users.

The workshop is the result of undergraduate thesis ” Development of an interdisciplinary instructional unit to teach computing in elementary school” of Nathalia Alves Cruz, a student of the Undergraduate
Computer Science course at the Department of Informatics and Statistics (INE ) of the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC).

Soon we will be publishing the instructional material on our website.