Computer Science 4-H Project Area

Discovering Computer Science and Programming Through Scratch curriculum introduces young people to five fundamental principles of computer programming, providing a foundation for exploring and creating. Scratch is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Each youth in a group should have his/her own guidebook.

• Level 1 - Youth interact with a series of tutorials and challenges within the Scratch environment. Young people can work on the activities individually, with partners, or in a guided instructional setting.
• Level 2 – This book delves deeper into important principles of computer science such as generalization and modularity, and introduces some additional features of Scratch such as clones and lists. Going through this book should strengthen youth’s programming skills, help them write better programs, and provide interesting ideas for further exploration.
• Level 3 – This book focuses on an interesting, powerful, and important technique from computer science called recursion. A recursive program is one which “calls itself”. In Scratch, this means using a block for the script within the very script that defines the block. Recursion makes solving many problems easier, and also allows one to do some things that would be very difficult to do without it, such as drawing intricate fractals.

Scoresheets

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Exhibit Ideas

• Make a display that showcases one or more of your completed activities. If there is technology available, you can make a screencast of one or more of your completed activities and create a short video to be shown on a computer or TV/DVD player.
• Examples of Blue Ribbon Exhibits

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