CanSat 2015 Xplorer Team

Xplore Scratch

The Xplorer team is quite fan of Scratch. Citing what is said in the Scratch website here: 

• "With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community.";
• "Scratch helps young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for life in the 21st century.";
• "Scratch is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is provided free of charge.".

For the CanSat competition it is essential to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively, and those abilities can be easily learnt with Scratch.

Scratch is a free fully visual programming environment where essential programming concepts can be learnt in a very easy way, like the concept of variables and cycles.

In the past 20th December 2014 part of the Xplorer team attended to a three-hour Scratch workshop which was quite enlightening and useful. It is now a goal of the Team that all its members (students and teachers) attend to this workshop. This was the game made by one of us in this three-hour workshop: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/40786700/#player. OK it is a bit primitive, but on our behalf it must be noticed that this game was developed in a three-hour workshop, while leaning Scratch, and when previously our knowledge of Scratch was absolutely none.

Even though Scratch is a fully visual programming environment/language, which usually are seen like serving only for fun and for teaching kids, Scratch in fact has lots of potential, look for instance the following examples implemented exclusively through Scratch:

• Complete game that we could see in any mobile platform, here;
• Example of integration with the computer camera, here.

If you have interest in Scratch, understand that the programming environment is totally free (you just have to join Scratch by registering in their website) and that there is lots of free (and paid) documentation/tutorials. In February 2015 a free online course will start here.

Enjoy!