The Teacher’s Guide To Scratch Book Series

What This Book Series Is

The Teacher’s Guide to Scratch Book Series is a practical guide for educators preparing  coding lessons and assignments in their K-12 classrooms. The world’s largest and most active visual programming platform, Scratch helps today’s schools answer the growing call to realize important learning outcomes using coding and computer science. This series illustrates the benefits and fundamental building blocks of Scratch coding, increasingly intricate affordances and expert-level potential of Scratch coding, details effective pedagogical strategies and learner collaborations, and offers actionable, accessible troubleshooting tips. Geared toward professional development to take the reader through three stages of learning – beginner, intermediate and advanced. Each book has four unique coding projects that will provide the technical training that teachers need to feel comfortable and confident in their skills and to help instill the same feeling of accomplishment in their students. Clear goals, a comprehensive glossary, and other features ensure the project’s enduring relevance as a reference work for computer science education in grade school. Thanks to Scratch’s cost-effective open-source license, suitability for blended and project-based learning, notable lack of privacy or security risks, and consistency in format even amid software and interface updates, this series will be an enduring practitioner manual and professional development resource for years to come.

Why Teachers & Schools Need These Books

As jurisdictions worldwide update curriculum and add this modern skill set to basic education, teachers are struggling to incorporate coding in their classrooms. With little support and even less time, educators need helpful, practical, and lasting solutions to adapt to this new demand. The Teacher’s Guide To Scratch is our answer to this challenge. We’ve compiled the most useful and usable projects, enlightening insights, helpful suggestions and sanity-saving troubleshooting tips that we could fit into 3 books. The series provides a complete learning path to coding education for K-10 teachers, starting from zero knowledge or comfort and providing step-by-step a path through learning all the necessary terminology and techniques necessary for coding curricula through practical, easy and well explained projects. This series will be the reliable guide there for you through every step until you understand the underlying concepts, meaning and potential of computer science and information theory needed to bring classrooms into the digital era and help them flourish. As multiple Teacher Innovator of the Year winner Shawn Patrick Higgins says about the books “Kai Hutchence has written the book that I can honestly say I wish I had when I started teaching”.

Why Scratch Is My Top Recommendation For Educators

Excerpt from Book 3: “I chose to make this series entirely focused on Scratch for a lot of reasons. In Book 1 I gave a lot of context about why and how Scratch is the best platform for teachers (and students) to get started with coding. I find it makes coding more engaging, visual, tactic, open, and immersive than competing platforms. Thanks to the socially-minded non-profit that runs it, it has a great track record of making decisions that are best for kids. We can count on it as a partner that avoids proprietary licensing, is privacy respecting, and is free and accessible to everyone, everywhere. It avoids the hassles of unnecessary and expensive physical components that break or go missing. It is platform agnostic so kids can access it on phone, tablet, chromebook, laptop or desktop, on any operating system through a browser, or can even download and install it locally so it can be used when reliable internet isn’t available. I don’t believe anything comes close to beating Scratch for how perfectly it suits education.”

Vouched For By World-Class Experts in Coding Education

Don’t believe us? Here’s some of what the experts, our esteemed foreword authors, have to say:

“As is necessary when offering a comprehensive guide to readers who have no experience coding, Hutchence anticipates and plans for multiple cases where confusion can potentially stifle readers as they go. He does an excellent job explaining paths forward for a diversity of situations when things may not be going as planned with Scratch or the book’s exercises.”

“Kai underscores the importance of the educator in the learning environment, helping learners through the cognitive and affective challenges they will encounter in their work. He offers a beautiful vision of the educator as a model learner—a member of the learning community who can be curious and vulnerable and fearless and brave.”

“I’ve read my fair share of Scratch programming books, but what Kai has done with this series is to forefront a spiraling project-based curriculum that is so good as to make Bruner blush. Woven throughout is an impressive focus on professional-level concepts cleverly nested beneath interest-driven outcomes. Each of the four main projects offers distinctly different lessons and appeals to a variety of learner styles, (shout out to the BarChartCrew!) while equipping the reader with contextual tools to understand both advanced coding and design concepts.”

Where to Buy It