I just posted the first week of student projects to the site and, before anyone jumps right to them, I want to explain what they are and give some tips on how teachers can use them and how students can get the most out of their SPARK experience with them.

Our SPARK Student Projects are small coding activities in Scratch that we slowly reveal throughout the week. We start the week with a screenshot or video of the end result and students should make an attempt to recreate the app or game shown on their own.  As the week goes on, we’ll post (and we’ll try to post daily) some updates and hints including code blocks, screenshots, videos, and instructions.

We encourage teachers to use these projects to both teach your students how to use Scratch, if they’ve never used it before, and to encourage them to experiment and try different solutions to add their own twists.  Since our goal is to spark creativity in students, it helps to keep a hands-off approach and watch the students try to solve the project problems and puzzles themselves.  If anyone has any questions on a project, they can ask in the project-specific Slack channel and get answers right away from other students and the SPARK team.

For students, each project has a goal to accomplish.  We’ll work towards achieving that specific goal with our hints and updates, but we also want everyone to extend the project and really customize it.  You’ll get more out of the projects if you put your own twist on them and you’ll be ahead of the competition when it comes time for SPARK Game Jam.  Keep in mind that we’re not revealing any of the prompts for Game Jam until the day of event so the more projects you do, the more comfortable you’ll be in Scratch and more you’ll be able to do within that time.

I can’t wait to see what students come up with and you want your projects featured on the SPARK site, shoot us an email with a link to your project!