It was Girls Lead Thursday, and we were running a Scratch storytelling workshop focused on starting our stories right. I had often observed students with rather elegantly scripted stories, involving three or more characters with several lines of dialogue and spanning multiple backgrounds. But when the story was over, they would manually click and drag each sprite back to its starting point and manually select the first background again. In computer science terms, this is called “initialization”: making sure that your program, whatever it does, starts up right. In Scratch, it means telling your sprites where to go and what to do when the green flag is clicked, which includes being in their starting positions.
At this point, the students were mostly involved with the process of creating their own work, and showing their work to others in person (“Come look what I did,” not, “Here’s a link”). They put things in their starting positions as if by hand, like they were setting up a physical game board. Without sharing their projects and getting feedback, it may have not occurred to them that someone else might want to run the thing more than once.
After snack, recess, and check-in, I brought up a Scratch project of mine on the SMARTBoard. I told them that today we’d be working on telling our stories with broadcast messages, and I had an example project to show them. I invited the students to read along, and a few did so with hesitation. There were a couple of giggles.
For those who didn’t click the link, the scene opens on a playground. A polar bear enters, stage right, saying, “Hello, I am a polar bear.” An angry-looking dinosaur enters, stage left, shouting, “What?! It is FAR TOO SOUTH for you to be a polar bear!” The scene abruptly shifts to snow-covered slopes, and the polar bear asks, “Is this better?” The dinosaur appears surprised and gasps, then shouts, “Yes, quite!”
“OK, so that story went pretty well,” I said. “What do you think would happen if I clicked the green flag again? Raise your hands,” I quickly added. Hands shot up, and I picked one.
“The story would go again.”
“All right,” I said. “Go ahead and press the green flag on the SMARTBoard, see what happens.”
The student did so, but the scene didn’t reset. The shouting dinosaur remained frozen in place on the snow-covered mountain. The polar bear introduced itself as usual, and then the dinosaur finally bellowed its opening line, with most of the students now reading along in enthusiastic unison. Then we were back at the playground, and the rest of the scene played out in otherwise normal fashion, the students laughing as they read the now mis-matching lines.
The students asked to read it again, so I said, “OK, we can play it again, but we have to try to fix it first. Who has an idea of what we can do here?”
Themistocles (not his real name) raised his hand – I covered some of this with him some days ago, and wanted to see how he would explain it to his peers. “You need to tell the sprites to go to where they start, and then to start moving around and stuff.” I’m paraphrasing, but the kid had it down. I invited him to start making changes on the SMARTBoard. He started dragging blocks of code around, and when he finished, we ran it. The kids read along, even louder than before. It still didn’t work quite right, so I called on other students to try things up front, with the whole group reading after each iteration.
At some point, they split into Team: Polar Bear and Team: Dinosaur, because of course they did. It didn’t take many iterations to get the story cued up properly; the students quickly figured out what to do, once they knew why they needed to do it. Miriam brought out a Flip camera for the final read-through, and managed to catch it just as the thing ran out of battery. Then the kids went to work on their own stories.
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