Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter 8 Visibility of eTwinning Projects Newsletter 8 | Page 42

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2018 Newsletter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Monkey”. Since we were able to buy “Mbots” and other robots, students got very motivated to learn how to programme them and we started using “mBlock Blockly” and “Makeblock” on iPads and smart phones. Students had to work on three programming challenges and on the last one, had to work on mixed nationality groups on Scratch projects chosen by them, finishing or improving each other’s productions, teaching and helping each other as they could chose together what to build. Our students started using ScratchJr to build collaborative stories when they were 8 years old and enjoyed it very much as they were able to animate their characters, use speech bubbles or include their own voices and sounds. All apps were to their liking and used with great enthusiasm, all but Scratch! Scratch is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group of the MIT Media Lab and it is available free of charge. It is a programming language and online community where teachers and students can create their own interactive stories, games, animations and much more! I was very keen on using Scratch in my classroom, but, I never expected that my students didn’t find it very appealing. They were able to create some scenes, animate some characters, but, contrary to what I was used to, they weren’t running to the computer in the morning to finish their work and kept on starting a new story instead of finishing the ones they had in hands. I think they were really needing Scratch 3.0!  After thinking about it, I have decided to look on eTwinning platform for a project on Scratch. A project where my students could communicate, collaborate and be enthusiastic about learning all they could, Scratch included, and I found just that on the eTwinning project International Scratch Challenge#2. This was a very well thought project. Students used the Scratch blocks on their own native language but that could be easily changed to English or other pretended language on the Scratch platform itself. After a while, and working with a French school, my students were living messages in French as well as in English and using “Google Translator” to better communicate with their French partners and happily receiving messages in Portuguese. In spite of the project’s name, on this eTwinning project, classrooms were encouraged to participate on other initiatives as “Code Week”, “Hour of Code” and “Scratch Day". Reading about “STEM Discovery Week 2018” we’ve decided on participating with a dissemination activity, bringing coding and robotics to students and classrooms who didn’t work on it. This activity was very successful and was replicated in a short while as students were getting used to showing and explaining their work and activities. The International Scratch Challenge#2 project brought together several classes around Europe. 42