In this activity the students are engaging in peer teaching with older students teaching younger students how to code using Scratch Jr.

The peer-to-peer approach has many benefits as we see it. It has a social function because it brings the older and younger students together in a meaningful activity and helps the younger students to dare to ask the older students for help or just speak to them outside the classroom.

The programming is a way to make the students acquainted with how algorithms works and to base a foundation to a deeper mathematical insight.

What was the purpose of the activity?

The younger students in the video are 8-9 years old and the students teaching them how to use Scratch are 13-15 years old.

The younger students in the video are taught how to program in Scratch Jr. Scratch is a free program with a very intuitive approach. You can download an extremely user friendly manual for Scratch, it comes in various languages this link is for the English version: Link for Scratch manual

In this particular video we had two pedagogical strategies and aims targeting the students: One for the older students, which was that they learned how to program in Scratch by a teacher and for them to orally explain how the program worked and by that get more confidence in presenting, but also to make them reflect on the features of the resource in contrast to just using it themselves. The pedagogical strategy we used to get the younger students on board was to use their older peers to show them how to use the resource. Also there were quite a few older students for a rather small group of younger students, which had a great impact on the pace, in which the younger students got a feel for the resource. They also quickly found their favourite tutor, who they asked, whenever they needed help. Our aim was to for the younger students to learn how to do basic programming and bond with some of the older students.

How the activity worked in the classroom?

The younger students learned to program in Scratch and they got a special connection to the older students (said “hi” when they met and chatted when they met in the cafeteria and so on). It was clearly a benefit to involve the older students in teaching programming, because of their status (as older students) but also because they explained programming in a language the younger students could easily relate to.

The process was really smooth, but the next time we do something similar it will be the same age of older students teaching even younger children.

How to develop the technology skills?

The teachers developed their skills by reading the manual and by trial and error when it got more complicated.

What technology can be used and are the alternatives?

We used the online resource Scratch, which is an online programming resource. You can just as well use “Hour of code” Link to hour of code  or Code academy – for a bit more advanced programming