Scratch Day @ Google TLV

In 2014 and 2015, we started a tradition of hosting Scratch Day events at the Google offices in Tel Aviv, as part of the global Scratch Day network of events. We hosted 150-200 middle school students and teachers every year, in partnership with the Ministry of Education.

The students presented their Scratch projects to Google Engineers in small groups, and got feedback and encouragement. They also got to participate in different workshops and learn more about the role of software engineers.

Since then, Google TLV celebrates Scratch Day every year, and in the last few years more tech companies have joined it.

Creative Computing Class with Scratch

Educating for Excellence (E4E) is an Israeli organization that operates after-school education centers for underprivileged youth across the country. Their focus is on giving their students positive learning experiences, and a lot is done to make sure that every lesson plan incorporates a lot of fun and creative activities.

I developed a Creative Computing class for E4E in 2013, based on the Creative Computing curriculum draft by Karen Brennan and the ScratchEd team. In 2013 and 2014 I taught the class myself, and have supported others that taught it in different E4E centers, for a total of 8 centers. It was later offered as part of E4E’s curriculum in all of their centers.

The class ends with a visit to Google’s offices, where the kids present their final projects, and learn about software engineering and technology. The video, from the Kids Channel in Israel, shows the first visit to the offices, where students met Meir Brand, Google Israel CEO and Google Engineers, and presented their final Scratch projects to them.

Creative Computing Class Curriculum:

• Student Booklet (Hebrew)

• Teacher Guide (Hebrew)

Scratch Teacher Workshop

After the Scratch Day events we hosted, we got a few requests from educators that wanted to learn more. So we designed a workshop on project-based teaching, in collaboration with the Computer Science Department of the Ministry of Education.

It focused on taking ideas from the world of software development and applying them to their teaching by adapting them to a classroom setting working with Scratch.

We covered topics ranging from how to come up with ideas and how to break a big project into smaller steps, through teaching debugging and advanced Scratch tools to How to encourage creativity and collaboration.

25 teachers participated in the first workshop, and each one was to give a workshop to another 10 teachers in their district.