Scratch is now the world’s largest coding community for kids. Scratch founder Mitch Resnick discusses the motivations underlying Scratch, the reasons for its success, and its plans for the future — including a sneak peek at the next generation of Scratch. Resnick also shared ideas and stories from his new book “Lifelong Kindergarten,” in which he argues that all of school (in fact, all of life) should be more like kindergarten — providing learners with opportunities to work on projects, based on their passions, in collaboration with peers, in a playful spirit. Resnick is Professor of Learning Research at MIT Media Lab.

​​With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community. Scratch helps young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for life in the 21st century. Scratch is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is provided free of charge.
(Source https://scratch.mit.edu/about)

At SWIS, all teachers from G3-G5 have teacher accounts created by Mr.Leonard and Coding with Scratch is a huge favorite of the children. Miss Kinneard, Mr.Leonard and Mr.Wheeler at SWIS have all run Scratch workshops for staff during this past two year. 

In KG-G2 Mr.Gower has introduced Scratch Jnr to our children.
ScratchJr is an introductory programming language that enables young children (ages 5-7) to create their own interactive stories and games. Children snap together graphical programming blocks to make characters move, jump, dance, and sing. Children can modify characters in the paint editor, add their own voices and sounds, even insert photos of themselves -- then use the programming blocks to make their characters come to life.

ScratchJr was inspired by the popular Scratch programming language (scratch.mit.edu), used by millions of young people (ages 8 and up) around the world. ScratchJr is available as a free app for both iPad and Android tablets.
For more information about ScratchJr, see scratchjr.org.

This game was developed by Zack when he was in Grade 4 during the Coding with Scratch ASA with Mr.Leonard. Unbelievably this only took him 75 minutes in total to create. 

Coding using Sphero

In G4 Math classes we used the Sphero to code squares and rectangles as we are focusing on shape and angles.

This year in G2 and G3 we used the Sphero during math classes that focused on area, perimeter, coordinates, angles and distance. 

The Hour of Code at SWIS

From the Archives! December 2015

​The library has been buzzing all week with children from a wide range of grades participating in activities during World Computer Science week. The Hour of Code is an annual event with more than 100 million participants around the world taking part this year. Here at SWIS, we harnessed a collaborative approach, with many single subject teachers offering activities in the Library such as ‘Morse Code’ in Music and ‘The Code of Gymnastics’ in PE. As well as these activities, we also participated using iPad apps such as Lightbot, Scratch Jr, and Kodable. Teaching kids to code is a great way to develop several positive traits: quick thinking, creativity as well as helping to improve problem-solving skills.