Maths with Scratch!

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Although Victorian Education Week is six weeks away (May 17th to 23rd), I am using some of the school holiday break to play with Scratch, so my Year 7 and 8 Maths classes can participate in the “Crack the Code with Maths” challenge. 

Scratch is simple-to-use software, that allows users to create animations using drag-and-drop commands. I hope to use this free program, pre-installed on our government school laptops, as part of our geometry learning this term.

Scratch uses the Cartesian Co-ordinate system to locate ‘sprites’ on a ‘stage’.The screen is a 480 x 360 rectangle, such that: the X position can range from 240 to -240, where 240 is the rightmost a sprite can be and -240 is the leftmost, and the Y position can range from 180 to -180, where 180 is the highest it can be and -180 is the lowest it can be. The centre of the screen, or ‘origin’, is known as (x=0, y=0) or (0,0).

The following links are some examples of what can be achieved with Scratch.

Student tasks:

  • Join the Scratch community, using your school username (eg. gow0049).
  • Explore the links above and other geometry-related Scratch projects.
  • Create your own Scratch project, drawing a different polygon (closed shape with straight sides) in each of four quadrats.
  • Can you create four different triangles? (equilateral acute, isosceles obtuse, scalene right-angled and one other combination of side-length and angle size).
  • Can you create four different quadrilaterals?
  • Can you create a regular pentagon, hexagon, octagon and nonagon?
  • Draw your initials, like these students in 5/6 Clark/Smith Can you translate and reflect your initials so they appear in all four quadrats?

Hour of Code!

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This week is the beginning of the International Week of Computer Science, when tens of millions of students from over 180 countries participate in “Hour of Code”. This is a great activity to introduce students to computer science in a fun, easy and accessible way. Here are some resources to introduce coding in your classroom:

Hour of Code website

Khan Academy Introduction to Hour of Code – video and resources

Make a Flappy Game – a ‘drag and drop’ method to create your own version of the popular flappy bird game.

Code with Anna and Elsa from Frozen

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This week we have about 30 students from Year 7 to 9 attending school, while the rest participate in the end of year “Great Hawkesdale Bike Ride”. They enjoyed creating their own Flappy Bird and Angry Bird Games and then constructing Christmas scenes in Minecraft. Which games did you create, which was your favourite and why?