Last term I was teaching my class to use some of the drawing features of Scratch so they could design, build and test their own drawing application. This was a really interesting unit to work on, as it was one of the first that didn't have a game as an outcome, but an application. We chose to have a clear audience for our work, building our programs with year 3 children in mind. Having taught the key skills of using pens and integrating buttons in Scratch, we moved away from the computer suite and turned our attention to usability; the measure of how easy an application is to use. We spent a long time considering the needs of our end user, a year 3 pupil. Through mindmapping, we drew out that our programs should be: colourful bold fun to use simple intuitive Before we could start coding, I set the children off designing their user interfaces with these key requi...

This Saturday we joined thousands of other coders around the world as we hosted our first ever World Scratch Day 2015 event in Canterbury. It was an excellent day which saw over 35 children and adults working together to solve problems, debug and collaborate. We kick started the day with a robotics enabled registration system, of course built in Scratch and with Lego Wedo equipment, where the attendees had to wave their hand in front of a sensor before entering their name. Names were then picked at random by the program, giving everyone a chance to introduce themselves to the group. We had a good range of ages, from year 3 (7 year olds) to year 7 (12 year olds), with everyone accompanied by an equally eager adult! We set a range of challenges for attendees to pick from, including robotics enabled games, door entry systems, video enabled games and more. Many also chose to continue ...