What superstars all of Year 1 have been this term during our ICT lessons.

They were able to use their already learned trackpad skills when we discovered Scratch Jr – an amination programme.

“Scratch Jr 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 and use the programming blocks to make their characters come to life.”

First, we explored how a project would look by investigating backgrounds and sprites.

Next, we used the programming blocks to make our sprite move – we had great fun finding out that we could make them jump, spin and even grow and shrink! We also found out that some blocks have numbers on them that we can change so we don’t have to use the same block lots of times.

After that, we discovered that we could have more than one sprite and that they could each have their own programmes! This was very exciting for us to create and we enjoyed watching each others animations.

 

Finally, we customised our very own sprites and we created our own ‘Space Race’ project, where we decided exactly how each sprite would move by creating an algorithm.

We are looking forward to Year 2 when we explore the Scratch Jr programme further.