Robotics Outreach

The Magic of Scratch is a training program that I designed under my FTC robotics Wizards.exe. We offered The Magic of Scratch to teach kids in elementary school how to use Scratch, a drag-and-drop programming language, to create basic animations and eventually more complicated games. The Magic of Scratch: An Introduction, was the name of the introductory training session, which sought to teach younger kids, around the ages of 5-10, how to use Scratch to make a simple animation. These classes were around an hour and a half to two hours long and since its inception, I have conducted over 9 training sessions with an average attendance of 12 students per session.

The Magic of Scratch didn’t just seek to teach kids about Scratch programming, however. It also introduced the world of FIRST robotics and STEM to the kids, inspiring them to join programs such as FIRST Lego League. The similarities between the Ev-3 mindstorms/We-Do programming languages and Scratch’s Drag-and-Drop interface were a great way to convince the kids that they could start programming robots that they built with their own bare hands. After each training session, we would receive countless requests from excited parents who wanted to get their kids involved in the world of FIRST.