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.
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.
Misconception: Students get confused reconciling the coordinate system with the point Scratch uses as the center for Sprites.
Mention to students that individual blocks in Scratch and Snap can be tested by double clicking them in the block library so they know this useful, non-intuitive trick for learning what an individual block does.
Scaffold students through reverse engineering existing Scratch projects to help them gain competency in important concepts like message passing, variables, and event-based programming.
Check out Professor Colleen Lewis’ online Scratch curriculum for ready-to-use CS classroom activities and for ideas for your own curriculum.