Children love playing computer games. In our school, we announced that we would let our students play games. That caught them surprised! What?! Our school, letting us play computer games?! Well, we told them, that the catch was that they had to create their own, and then could play those! That got them excited! And thus started, our gentle introduction to Scratch. We are the first school in Pune to start teaching Scratch as a full time subject into our curriculum, for classes from 5th to 9th.
Normally learning programming becomes difficult for school kids due to complicated structure of the programming languages. Scratch is a programming language that avoids these complicacies for young beginners. With the help of Scratch they can write the programs easily without having to learn syntactically correct writing. Scratch is developed to help students hone their creativity, logical thinking, problem solving and most importantly self learning skills.
As a next logical step to this; we organized an Intra-school Scratch Contest to culminate the training. Students of class 5 to 9 were required to develop a story or game in Scratch based on Indian Mythology, History, Geography and Civics. They were allowed to pick the topic of their own choice from these subjects and follow their respective text books for themes. All the projects were their own dreams! They chose the topics, made the scripts, searched for pictures and audios, incorporated the music and dialogues. They also developed logic of the game and wrote the programs themselves. And they even did their own troubleshooting and problem solving when they were stuck!
The outcome was – 36 incredible projects created by the students. There was good response from class 5 and 6 to the contest. About 25 projects were from this group itself. The themes for the games created by students ranged between Chota Bheem, Gokul Ashtami, KBC, Matsyavedha, Ramayana the Epic, Shivaji Protocol, World War, Khilafat Movement, Ganesha’s quest, The fight of Mahabharat, Malaysian War, Krishna Vs Kaunsa, Ramayan, Bal Hanuman, Krishna and his adventures to name a few. Hats off to the imagination power of these students! MillenniumÂ’s infrastructure is of a great help to students for learning Scratch and creating their projects. Students are able to use the computers in the computer lab extensively for such projects and for their studies too. Students completed these projects under the expert guidance of Mrs. Shilpa Narvekar of our school.
As the next step up the ladder, Millennium didnÂ’t want to restrict this training only to its students but also wanted to spread the word amongst other schools about Scratch and importance of its training to the students. As a part of this endeavor, we had organized an Inter-School Scratch Competition on 3rd March 2012 at our school; in association with the Persistent Foundation. This was a first time that such competition was being organized. Students from classes 5 to 10 from different schools were invited to present their projects under different categories based on age group.
Millennium National School, Karnataka High School, SPM English medium school and P. B. Jog Secondary School participated enthusiastically in the competition. Teams of 2 to 4 students each participated in three categories – Sub junior group (class 5 and 6), Junior group (class 7 and 8) and Senior group (class 9 and 10). Again at the inter-school competition we got to see mesmerizing games designed indigenously on topics ranging from History, Geography to Mythology. There was so much complexity and there were so many intricacies involved in these games – we could see budding planners and strategists in those teams. It was hard to believe that the creators of these games were – only students!
This year, we just had a total of 4 schools who participated. We hope to spread the movement in the next year, with Persistent Foundation planning to conduct teacher training workshops. LetÂ’s see how it goes…
Mr. Sanjeev Khadilkar and Mr. Anand Paropkari from Persistent Systems were the honorable judges for the competition and Mr. Shekhar Sahastrabuddhe from Persistent Foundation was the Chief Guest. Millennium was the overall winner of this competition – bagging the maximum prizes in each category.
Here are the winners:
Sub Junior group (class 5 and 6)Â
Winner : Millennium National School
Class 5
Project : The Holy Fire
Omkar Apte, Rohan Patwardhan, Krinal Doma
Consolation Prize : Karnatak High School
Class 6
Project : The Quiz
Ananya Angadi, Mrudul Parasnis
Junior group (class 7 and 8)  Â
Winner : Millennium National School
Class 7
Project : Bal Hanuman
Pranav Deo, Anshuman Vaidya, Bhaibhav Anand, Saiel Navghare
Consolation Prize : SPM English medium school
Class 8
Project : World Of Hanuman
Poorva Kajale, Sejal Mehta, Suyash Kulkarni, Sareen Shah
Senior group (class 9 and 10)  Â
Winner : Millennium National School
Class 9
Project : Medieval Hero
Mahimna Kelkar, Eshaan Deshpande, Aniket Bhagwat, Parth Bhave
Consolation Prize : P. B. Jog Secondary School (English medium)
Class 9
Project : Shivaji’s Quest
Aditya Ujeniya, Amit Gundale
Our strong belief is that through this programming activity, the analytical and logical capabilities of students will be greatly enhanced. Not only that, but common problem solving skills of students are greatly enhanced too – which is a very essential real-world skill. And we want to spread the word! If you know anyone who would be interested, please, do let us know!
Hoping to create a smarter, more mathematically oriented and analytical future generation…
