This past week we were working on programing our own games or activities on scratch. I thought the programming was a little difficult and got me frustrated from time to time. I was able to program a pretty decent but very short game in the hour and a half that I worked before taking a break form the frustration. The idea of my game is to lead the dinosaur to the healthy food and avoid the junk food. My original idea for this program was to have 3-4 different stages each were the food got a little faster. For the lack of full understanding of the website and programming in general I was unable to finish the entire game, at this point. One thing I struggled with that kept me from moving forwards was I could not figure out how to make all of the fruit disappear once I had eaten all the healthy food. My main goal was to figure out how to get to the next stage without having to eat the junk food, I was unable to accomplish this and due to the frustration is caused I have not gone back to take a second try. I am sure soon enough I will try again but as of now, here is STAGE ONE.
After the sharing we did of our programs in class we had a class debate on if we would use programming in our classrooms or not. I was a head spokesmen for the side of the debate where we decided that programming should not be a part of our classrooms. We discussed that there is so much more math that is embedded into our curriculum that there is more important things to focus on then programming. We did agree with the other side of the argument that it could be used in the classroom as a introduction then the students could use it at their own leisure. It could be a fun activity for those who are interested but since it is not a necessary skill for all students it should not be a requirement. If every school was to introduce this at some point in their curriculum the students that were interested would have a chance to try it out. I think that in the higher levels or schooling, more into middle and high school they could make computer programming an elective and that would give the students who are interested a better look inside. So, now I think that I could use this in my classroom as a hook for some parts of math. I think with the grades I want to teach this site might be a little too advanced but if I was able to find a site that was for beginners it might be something they could try. But as I said before, this would just be something for fun like an extra choice.