Scratch Lists - Introduction to using Arrays - Library Game

**Scratch - Lists **- Teaching simple lists/arrays

In this Scratch lesson we take pupils from no experience of Scratch to a good understanding with the skills to solve problems and think algorithmically. Students should enter this scheme of work with a very basic understanding of how games are designed, having some graphical based language experience such as Scratch, Kodu, HourOfCode, etc is a benefit. In addition to other expectations, this lesson is not expected to be the first lesson in a series of Scratch lessons, it would be innapppriate for those with no Scratch experience to start at this point, for example this lesson is lesson 5 in my Scratch SoW and pupils should already have some experience with using a Variable in Scratch. Support pupils by issuing them with the two Lists supports sheets included in the Support ZIP.

This is particularly useful for meeting the needs of teaching a graphical block based programming language based on (KS3 in England / BGE in Scotland) outcomes and is a strong foundation/scaffolding to supporting students to program in a text based programming language in following units.

For the less confident teacher I have included a bunch of complete programs to demonstrate WAGOLL, see the Teacher ZIP.

In this lesson:
Brain teaser bell activity.
Big question - if a variable can store a name, how do we store a whole class of names?
Revisit the features of the Scratch IDE
Look back at Variables and introduce the Lists options
Common problems - pupils should pay particular attention to the instructions on page 2 that relates to Spot1, Spot2 and Spot3, the code is given once and they must change the code to suit each spot.
Challenge - to build a game following a set of instructions from a help sheet
Reflection extension tasks - pupils answer questions relating to game engagement and playability