Scratch is a bright and colourful looking innovation. Looks like a lot of fun and could be great to enhance logic and thinking skills in students. Looks especially useful for the child who has good computer skills and needs some challenges of which I'm not one! I could see it as a useful classroom tool to give to the child who is turned on by the computer programming side of technology and have them create a scratch to show for the class. It could be a motivating force to develop other student's interest in learning these skills that scratch would develop.
The sequential nature of Scratch would be a great learning tool for some children. The more analytically minded child that learns well through logic and patterns would enjoy using Scratch. Some of the more creative children might find it too laborious. Scratch could be a match for some students. Not every child needs to do everything available. Knowing it's out there is good from my point of view. I can put it in my tool kit of technological learning innovations.
The downside is certainly the time consuming nature of learning it and getting familiar with it. However I wonder if time is not really the best framework to judge this innovation on though. So if it takes a bit of time in the classroom is this a bad thing?
I think you're right...I dislike Scratch for use in class because it is so time consuming. But I guess there's nothing wrong with that if it is accompanied by total silence while the kids are thinking :)
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