First Scratch Day declared a success
2017 Scratch Day participants
On Saturday, May 13, Georgia Southern University hosted its first Scratch Day event in the College of Education’s Innovation Studio.
Scratch Day is a global network of events aimed to give educational professionals the opportunity to explore Scratch, a free coding platform and online community designed for kids. The event was open to educational professionals who wanted to learn or share knowledge about Scratch and discover how it can enhance learning opportunities for students.
“I am declaring our first Scratch Day a success,” said Chuck Hodges, Ph.D., associate professor of instructional technology at Georgia Southern. “I hope we can do a similar event for Scratch Day in 2018. Coding and computational thinking are current ‘hot topics’ in education, and it is important for us to help keep local teachers up to date with new technologies and concepts.”
Fourteen educators representing Bulloch, Burke, Candler and Effingham County schools participated in the inaugural event including both group and one-on-one activities to explore Scratch and the implementation of the platform in the classroom.
“The format of the session, mostly hands-on practice, allowed the teachers the time to work with Scratch and get an idea of how it might work for their students,” said Hodges. “The follow-up evaluation showed that the session was “very useful” and that many of the teachers plan to use Scratch in their classes soon.”
Hodges and fellow instructional technology faculty member Mete Akcaoglu, Ph.D., coordinated the event. For more information about future events, follow the College of Education’s Innovation Studio on Facebook and Twitter.
Scratch was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT and encourages creative thinking and reasoning for students to work individually or collaboratively in groups. Scratch is currently being utilized by students in elementary schools to colleges worldwide. For more information on Scratch, visit https://scratch.mit.edu/.
Posted in COE Events