Use scoreboards to motivate the use of variables because young students have developed strong mental models for scoreboards through previous exposure allowing them to quickly understand what variables are.
Allocate the last 15 minutes of class for students to share their work with each other in beginning Scratch classes because students enjoy seeing each others projects and demonstrating their progress.
Talk to students about appropriate social behavior in the Scratch community because there is a large number of people on scratch.mit.edu who connect over their projects, which provides a safe and narrow space for learning about online etiquette.
Tell students to experiment and break things so they maximize their learning opportunities and exposure to different aspects of Scratch to gain experience and build competency.
Have students give you instructions on how to get from the door to chair on the other side of the room to teach them to be precise when giving instructions to a computer.
Ask students “What were you trying to do?” when they ask for help to help answer their own questions because they may already have the skills to debug their own Scratch programs.
Assign students an “all-about-me” project to practice introductory Scratch content and to engage with computational thinking through expressing themselves.
Teach students (even young kids) the 20/20/20 rule: every 20 minutes, students should focus their eyes on an object 20 feet away for 20 seconds to protect their vision and create healthy habits.
Give students, especially younger kids, “movement breaks” so that they don’t have to sit still and stare at a computer for too long.