Today, I collaborated with the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) to run an Animate Your Name With SCRATCH coding session for girls in grades 2-4.
SWE is a non-profit organization that is one of the largest advocates for women in engineering and technology. SWE has a mission to empower young women under 18 years old, encouraging them to get interested in coding, engineering, and technology.
There were two sessions – one in the morning and one in the afternoon. For each session, we used Skype to meet virtually and began by discussing what programming concepts were and how they were used in real life as well as SCRATCH. The girls came up with an example of Sequencing by discussing number order and color order. An example of an event was a birthday celebration. Lastly, an example of a loop was created by describing the girls’ morning routines.
We then began the process of animating our names step-by-step. First, we planned out our names and their respective animations. Then, we designed our names with fun colors and letters. After that, we animated our names, complete with silly sounds and exciting movements. Some girls used sound for only one letter, others didn’t use sound at all! There were many unique and creative ideas utilized. Finally, we each presented our projects, showing off the cool animated names that each girl created.
The girls’ projects can be found here:
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/417361079
