Scratch Projects for Kids

As you probably know, I live in Vancouver, BC, Canada. BC for now is not under a complete lock down, but schools are closed (and it’s unclear what will happen with schools yet, we just “came back” from spring break), public areas are closed (libraries, museums, restaurants, etc.) and most workplaces sent people to work from home wherever possible. Like everyone around the globe, this is pretty new to us. Keeping the kids busy (at home, not outside), while trying to limit their screen time and do some work is not easy. But I managed to start something I wanted to do a long time ago, teach my kids to code.

I have a 9yo daughter and a 6yo son and they both did some activities on code.org in the past. Code.org is nice, but we only did the beginner stages where they learned how to use the different blocks. We never continued to the more complex stages of real coding. That was a while ago and we haven’t done much coding since.

These days, with the coronavirus mess, the kids asked to do coding again. This time we’ve decided to go with Scratch (the kids worked with it a little bit at school). As this is a programming environment, I needed some “challenges” to give them and guide them through. I managed to gather a few and worked with both of them. In this post I wanted to explain the projects a bit and provide the code my daughter wrote (some of the ideas I took from Scratch website, others are mine). If you want to teach your kids (and I assume you know coding if you read my blog), it will be super easy to see what we did and do the same with your kids.

I hope it will help. If you have more projects (for my kids’ ages), I’ll be happy to add them here.

Scratch

If you don’t know what Scratch is, it’s quite simple. It’s an environment where you can code with blocks (instead of writing words) and the environment is graphical (with backgrounds, characters, etc.) while you code each character (called sprites in Scratch). But it does have some complex options (including all kind of operations, variables and you can even build your own blocks). To use Scratch simply go the the website scratch.mit.edu. There’s a lot of information there, and when you’re ready just hit “create” at the top. On the create page you can also save your project or load existing ones (like the ones below).

Maze

This was the first project and it’s super simple. It’s basically from Scratch website (here), but my daughter managed to find a way to make “level 2” and I was super proud because she came up with this on her own.

The maze itself is easy and basic, she tried a couple of things and then wanted to move on. My son on the other hand worked a long time on his and created a complex one.

Whack-A-Mole

The next project was showing a sprite (a unicorn in her case) and trying to click on it before it disappears.

Pong

This is also a well known beginners project for Scratch, the good old pong game.

Hide and Seek

This is the first one that is completely original. The concept of the game is that there is a hidden sprite on the screen and as you move the mouse cursor you get “hot/warm/cold” messages until you touch the sprite and then you win. For that I had to teach them how to use the “broadcast” to send messages from one sprite to another.

Calculator

This is another original challenge and it is much more complicated as I wanted my 9yo to make a more complex project and get a sense of bugs, etc.

The first step was to have 2 sprites, one that asks for 2 numbers (and she had to learn about variables to do that) and the other one will give the result. I also wanted to add the option to choose the math operation, so we did that using 4 letters (A for addition, S for subtraction, M for multiplication and D for division). It’s not really intuitive, but once you get how it works, it’s pretty easy and it was a great challenge.