Why should students work with SCRATCH and GEOGEBRA?

 

Teachers of the project schools have something in common. We all have some experience in teaching SCRATCH and GEOGEBRA in different subjects, e.g.Computer Science, Maths or use it in Art lessons or in the Afternoon Clubs. We believe that computational thinking and first ideas of coding are very important for students to be prepared  for  future professional life. The poster and article by Miles Berry (UK) concerning computational thinking shows important concepts and approaches that students have to develop to improve these skills.

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SCRATCH and GEOGEBRA are software products to be used to make progress towards computational thinking (see didactic article about the relation between coding and GeoGebra). The partners have discussed the topics for this small project. We would like to keep the project compact - one or two topics for each software that could be realized by all partners - in a few lessons, in an the Afternoon Club or as a competition within their own schools and then internationally. 

Which topics did we choose for Scratch and GeoGebra and why?

We chose games and greeting cards as topics for  SCRATCH organized in a collaborative way among all partners as we know that students love games and creating them and also like short projects with almost no limits for their creativity. 

Using tools and animation in GEOGEBRA to create computational art or real life objects in motion was chosen because it also fosters abstraction, modelling, using decompostition/coding and is highly motivating for students. We also offered a competition within all schools and later among the best products of all partnering schools. Students were highly motivated to create artwork because we could include the participation of an artist.

With all chosen activities we hope to make the use of ICT more attractive for students in general.

Cross-Curriculum activities?

Some of us worked with GeoGebra in Math lessons, some in Art, some in Technology and/or cooperatively in different lessons. Different evaluations made clear that working with GeoGebra really fosters computational thinking especially when using animations or creating tools. Working with GeoGebra inspires creativity, e.g. in Art as well as positive attitude towards Math and Geometry especially for those who are not so good at Mathematics. 

Here we have collected students' work  with Scratch and GeoGebra that they have created besides the main projects (Scratch games and cards) and GeoGebra (competition using tools and animation project), More contributions of students are in the forum.