Getting Unstuck

An intermediate Scratch curriculum to support�design studio culture in the classroom

Creative Computing Lab

Harvard Graduate School of Education

July 2021

gettingunstuck.gse.harvard.edu

Getting Unstuck is a 10-module intermediate Scratch curriculum to help your students develop greater creative and conceptual fluency with code. Each of the 10 modules offers a prompt for student-directed Scratch projects using a particular computational concept.

What if your students could create anything they imagined with code?

To do this, we reimagine the classroom as a design studio: a culture of learning in which students continuously explore, create, share, and reflect. Design studio culture is joyful, engaged, playful, and collaborative. The design studio is brought to life in each module through a collection of activities that foster this culture of learning and students’ evolving creative and conceptual fluency.

Computer code is an incredibly powerful medium for self-expression and problem solving, and all young people should have opportunities to develop fluency with code. As with any medium, the more we use it, the greater our fluency with it becomes.

The focus on a particular computational concept in each module supports the development of conceptual fluency: that is, deepening understandings of key computer science concepts, like sequences, events, parallelism, and data. And because the project prompts are otherwise open-ended, students have the opportunity to develop creative fluency: that is, figuring out what they are interested in and what they want to work on, as well as exploring the expansive possibilities of what can be made with code.

We chose the name Getting Unstuck to acknowledge the inherent challenges of a design studio approach. As students pursue their creative dreams with code, there will be moments when they get stuck! We hope that the Getting Unstuck curriculum will support you and your students in navigating these moments and creating projects that are personally and socially meaningful.

How do I get started with the curriculum?

Browse, try, and choose modules

Prepare design journals

Develop assessment plans

Differentiate activities

Set up Scratch access

What does the curriculum feel like?

The design studio

Exploring in the design studio

Creating in the design studio

Sharing in the design studio

Reflecting in the design studio

How is the curriculum organized?

Modules

Activities

Design journals

Sessions

Who created the curriculum?

Contents

You are encouraged to select whichever modules are of greatest interest and use to your students. The modules are ordered in terms of conceptual complexity, but they can be introduced in any order. The When Clicked module is a great place to start.

The modules are self-contained, so you can teach as many or as few modules as you like. We recommend teaching at least 3 modules to help students develop comfort and confidence with the design studio approach to creating and learning.

The curriculum is organized as 10 modules. Each module includes resources and activities to help students create self-directed Scratch projects in response to a specific prompt.

How is the curriculum organized?

Based on teachers’ classroom use of the curriculum, we expect that each module will take five 45-minute sessions.

Modules

The curriculum consists of 10 modules, and each module contains 18 activities from which to choose. In this section, we provide an overview of the modules and the activities, with an example of how a module might be mapped across sessions.

The activities in each module are designed to help students create Scratch projects that are unique and matter to them, while exploring a particular computer science concept. This work is supported through the essential design studio practices of exploring, creating, sharing, and reflecting.

Each module includes 18 activities. We have identified 6 of these activities as foundational (listed in the table below). We recommend including these activities when facilitating a module.

Activities

Along with the 6 foundational activities, we encourage you to include some of the 12 other activities, which are listed on the next page. These activities are intended to offer other ways of supporting your students’ (and your own!) creative and conceptual fluency. We hope that you remix and reimagine these activities, as well as include activities you are excited about from other sources—whatever works best for you and your students!

The activity pages in each module are designed to be shared with students—to guide their work and to help them keep track of their learning. We call a student’s collection of activity pages their design journal. In each module, we have included a cover page for students’ design journals. This cover page offers an overview of the module’s project prompt through text and video, as well as a list of key activities for quick reference.

Design journals

There are many ways to structure a Getting Unstuck module across class sessions, depending on how long and how often you see your students. Given variability from classroom to classroom, each module includes planning space for you to choose activities and map them across sessions, instead of specifying how the activities should be organized.

Sessions

To inspire your pedagogical imagination, here is one example of a session mapping. A teacher who is teaching the When Clicked module over five sessions might organize the activities like this:

What does the curriculum feel like?

In a design studio classroom, students are constantly exploring, creating, sharing, and reflecting.

If you’ve been in a classroom like this, you already know what it feels like, sounds like, and looks like. As shorthand, we talk about this kind of classroom as having a design studio culture.

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In this section, we describe how the curriculum supports design studio culture through the exploring, creating, sharing, and reflecting activities in each module.

The Getting Unstuck curriculum reimagines the classroom as a design studio. The design studio is a culture of joyful learning by creating—an environment in which students are engaged continuously in exploring, creating, sharing, and reflecting. In the design studio classroom, students are working on projects that they love, that challenge them intellectually, that they’re excited to share with others, and that engage them in thinking about thinking.

In Practice: 4th Grade Elementary Classroom

Most of Ms. Jones’ students are confidently making Scratch projects with only one sprite, but Ms. Jones wants to introduce students to the idea that they can program multiple sprites to do things simultaneously. Working with multiple sprites can encourage students to create more complex projects and spark new ideas about what they might make.

To introduce the computational concept of parallelism, which students will need to know in order to create their Parallelism projects, Ms. Jones uses the Unplugged activity from the curriculum, with students acting out code through movement. In a reflective discussion afterwards, Ms. Jones helps students make connections between the computational concept, their movements, and the actions that sprites can take. She hopes that if students are more comfortable with parallelism, they’ll be more successful in creating projects that include multiple sprites.

Each module dedicates time for students to explore their own wonderful ideas and the computational concept featured in the prompt for the Scratch project they will create.

Exploring in the design studio

Explore activities invite students to find inspiration in Scratch projects that other people have created and to develop ideas for projects through brainstorming. Students can explore the key concept of the module by reading example project code or by going screen-free with the big idea in an interactive unplugged activity.

A whiteboard after the Brainstorm Ideas activity

Sample projects from the Inspiration Studio activity

Creating in the design studio

In Practice: 5th Grade STEAM Lab

Students in Mr. Garcia’s class are working on the Ask and Answer project, learning how to use ask and answer blocks to receive and store user input. During one session, a student tells Mr. Garcia that his answer block isn’t working the way he wants it to. Instead of telling this student that the block should probably be in a different place, Mr. Garcia recommends that the student utilize the Unstuck Strategies page and collaborate with a peer to develop a solution. The students look in the Inspiration Studio to see how the blocks are used in other contexts. Mr. Garcia hopes that students can practice seeking support from their peers, as well as from him.

In the same session, Mr. Garcia notices three students who are not sure what they want to happen in their projects. Mr. Garcia decides to pull them into a small group to draw out different scenes that could happen in their projects using the Storyboard activity. He hopes that this lightweight planning will help students get more concrete about their projects.

Creative work takes time. As such, the design studio classroom devotes considerable time for students to work on their projects.

In addition to the Project Prompt activity that introduces the prompt and serves as a reference throughout project development, Create activities can help students develop their vision through planning, get started by remixing a project, and use strategies to make progress when they encounter challenges. These activities support student progress in a variety of collaborative configurations: from one-on-one support, to small group coaching, to peer support, to moments of whole group instruction.

The project prompt page for the When Clicked prompt

Three ideas from an Unstuck Strategies page

Sharing in the design studio

In Practice: 6th Grade Computer Science Lab

After several sessions in Ms. Chen’s class, students’ Key Press projects have started to take shape. Ms. Chen is able to see what sprites and backgrounds students have picked, as well as the initial blocks students are using for each sprite. Even though the projects aren’t finished yet, Ms. Chen identifies this as an opportunity for students to practice sharing feedback.

During sharing time, Ms. Chen encourages students to practice leaving constructive comments on their peers’ projects using the Leave a Comment activity. After, students have the opportunity to meet in small groups to discuss the feedback they received from others and how they plan to improve their designs. Through this process, students connect with their peers, build their understanding of computational concepts, and further develop their project ideas. As Ms. Chen watches her students provide constructive feedback to their peers, she sees her students recognize how sharing feedback on others’ in-progress work can support their own creative projects.

Sharing work and receiving feedback from peers are key design studio practices, fueling the motivation students will draw on as they develop their projects. Feedback can serve as affirmation of work done so far, as well as inspiration for what to do next with projects.

The curriculum includes a variety of structured protocols to help students share their work and offer each other constructive criticism, both synchronously (e.g., through paired face-to-face conversations) and asynchronously (e.g., through Scratch’s online comments system).

Fewer squirrels, more cats: feedback from the Red Yellow Green activity

Sentence starters from the Gallery Walk activity

❤️ Something I like about the project...

❓ Something�I wonder...

⭐️ Something I’m excited about...

In Practice: 4th Grade Inclusion Classroom

Ms. Patel is interested in understanding how students encounter and resolve challenges while working on their Loops projects. After each session, students record a reflection in their design journals using the prompts from the Journal Entries activity. As Ms. Patel reviews student reflections, she learns that one student was confused by the pen blocks. Each time the student placed these extension blocks into a code stack, the code produced different drawings than intended. Eventually, by looking at example projects and Scratch tutorials, the student was able to successfully use the pen blocks.

Through this reflective writing, the student realized that taking a creative risk helped her gain a new skill and feel motivated to continue refining her work. The reflective writing was also beneficial to Ms. Patel. Ms. Patel was surprised by the reflection because, based on reviewing the student’s project, she hadn’t realized her student had faced these challenges. The reflective writing helped Ms. Patel see how the student got stuck and unstuck.

Reflecting in the design studio

There is no learning without reflection. By reflecting on their project and their process, students can develop critical and reflective attitudes towards their own work. Students’ projects do not necessarily have to be finished or flawless for students to draw connections between what they have made and what else they want to learn.

There are several activities in the curriculum to help make student thinking and learning visible—providing insight into students’ experiences formatively and summatively, which can help you assess students’ needs throughout and across the modules.

Excerpt from a student’s summative Self Assessment page

The Code Comments activity introduces reflective documentation

Additional Resources

Modifications for Common Teaching Practices (Code.org): Guide to adapting computing teaching strategies, such as pair programming and debugging, based on teaching environment.

Learn from Anywhere Guide (CS First): Tips to support students in remote, low-bandwidth, and asynchronous environments.

Many of the activities in the curriculum were initially designed for an in-person classroom setting. But based on classroom testing, we learned how to support design studio culture in a variety of contexts. Here are some ideas to inspire your thinking about design studio activities that are equitable and inclusive across settings.

How do I get started with the curriculum?

Browse, try, and choose modules

In this section, we offer prompts and planning space for getting started with the Getting Unstuck curriculum: choosing your modules, preparing design journals, developing assessment plans, differentiating activities, and setting up Scratch access.

Choosing from the 10 modules of the curriculum involves consideration of your students’ prior experiences and their goals and interests. Before getting started with Getting Unstuck, consider which modules you might implement with your students by browsing the collection and trying some of the activities yourself.

Design journals—the collection of student activity pages that shape the learning experience—are an essential design studio tool. Design journals support students in thinking about their progress throughout the modules, and they help you to see, understand, and support that progress. We offer some questions to help you set up student design journals.

Prepare design journals

Develop assessment plans

In addition to strategies provided in this curriculum, we encourage you to use your favorite and familiar assessment strategies. For more assessment inspiration, we invite you to explore our report, Assessing Creativity in Computing Classrooms.

In the Getting Unstuck curriculum, students develop greater creative and conceptual fluency with code by creating self-directed programming projects with Scratch. Our assessment strategies make students’ evolving creative and conceptual fluency visible not only through the projects students create, but through their sharing and reflecting activities. Collectively, the documentation of these activities in student design journals serves as evidence about students’ content understanding and, equally importantly, what projects personally mean to students.

Differentiate activities

The Getting Unstuck curriculum was designed as an intermediate Scratch experience for upper elementary students. But within and beyond that demographic, the classroom contexts for computing vary considerably, as do the students in those classrooms. While we have provided materials to inform your curriculum planning, we know that your students will flourish if their multiple identities, interests, assets, and needs are accommodated through adapted activities.

We offer some adaptations below for multilingual students, for students with special needs, for students who benefit from additional challenge, for students of different ages—adaptations that can benefit many students at different moments. Who are your students? What additional adaptations might you include?

Set up Scratch access

Scratch is the central tool of Getting Unstuck. Although Getting Unstuck is an intermediate Scratch learning experience, this may be the first time that your students are being asked to use their own Scratch login, or to share a project and add it to a class studio.

We have created how-to Scratch logistics pages that may be helpful to you and your students: how to create a studio, how to share a project to a studio, how to fill in a Scratch project page, how to give credit, and how to give feedback. Additionally, here are some Scratch-related questions you might consider as you plan to teach Getting Unstuck.

Maintaining a list of class usernames, as well as which emails students used to make their accounts, can be useful in helping students remember usernames and reset passwords.

The Getting Unstuck curriculum was developed through a research-practice partnership.

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The curriculum was developed by members of the Creative Computing Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education: Paulina Haduong, Mary Adelaide Williamson, Laura Peters, Sara Smolevitz, Brian Yu, and Dr. Karen Brennan.

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The curriculum was co-designed and classroom-tested by practitioners: Kimberly Boyce-Quentin, Jenn DesAutels, Jennifer Ham, Kate Keogh, Bonnie Knecht, Susan Leifer, Bill Marsland, Lilli Meloche, Mindy Pastuszak, Jill Osborne, Laurel Pollard, Aaron Reuland, and Bradley Quentin. We would also like to acknowledge the participants of the 2018 and 2020 Getting Unstuck online professional learning experiences, who inspired this project.

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The curriculum development process was supported by members of the Getting Unstuck research advisory board: Dr. Elizabeth A. Davis, Dr. Colleen Lewis, Dr. Renée McCauley, and Dr. Mitchel Resnick.

Connect with our team and with other educators on Twitter at @HGSE_CCL, in the Getting Unstuck Facebook group, or via email at gettingunstuck@gse.harvard.edu.

This curriculum has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license, which means that you are free to use, change, and share the curriculum, as long as you provide appropriate attribution and give others access to any derivative works.

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If you develop a translation of the curriculum, create new activities to extend the curriculum, or adapt the activities in the curriculum, and you would like to make your work available to others, please email us. We would be delighted to add your extensions to the Getting Unstuck website, with appropriate credit.

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Recommended citation: Brennan, K., Haduong, P., Williamson, M. A., Peters, L., Smolevitz, S., & Yu, B. (2021). Getting unstuck: An intermediate Scratch curriculum to support design studio culture in the classroom. Creative Computing Lab. Retrieved from https://gettingunstuck.gse.harvard.edu/

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Getting Unstuck was made possible with support from the National Science Foundation through grant #1908110. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Who created the curriculum?

This curriculum has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license, which means that you are free to use, change, and share the curriculum, as long as you provide appropriate attribution and give others access to any derivative works.

Getting Unstuck was made possible with support from the National Science Foundation through grant #1908110. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.