About

Welcome to Pike Sprites!

On this site, you’ll find self-paced lessons that teach how to use Scratch software to create animated drawings, games, and stories. Scratch makes it possible for elementary school students to learn the basic elements of computer programming and computational thinking in a way that’s fun and productive. At Pike School, these lessons are used by students in grades 6-9 who participate in the Sprites after-school club.

Unlike traditional computer programming materials, these lessons are organized by the basic tasks that game- and story-makers need to know. For example, early lessons cover how to make a sprite move around the screen or avoid obstacles rather than being organized to teach logical operators or control commands. To say this another way, I teach the computer programming essentials in a sequence is determined by the tasks that young programmers find most useful for their work.

If you are new to Scratch, it’s best to begin with the lessons in Getting Started. After you’ve mastered those skills, you can try the lessons in Games, Drawing, or Stories. The Featured Projects on the home page are the hardest to tackle — not because they are more complicated, but because I provide fewer hints and leave more to the reader to do independently.

You can see additional examples of Scratch projects and download Scratch (it’s free) if you visit MIT’s Scratch website at http://scratch.mit.edu. Scratch was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to help students learn that they can be creators — as well as consumers — of computer games, animations, and artwork.

Terry Dash, Director of Technology, The Pike School (tdashATpikeschool.org)