Am I a professional coder?

For this weeks blog post I chose to create a short video by coding on Scratch, which initially I felt confident about. When I first opened Scratch I looked around on the site to find tutorials or inspiration for my creation. I knew I knew I wanted to create some type of story with different characters and backgrounds. When I started coding, I was almost immediately confused about everything… I had no idea how to use Scratch backgrounds or how to use more than one character in the story. I decided I would go to Youtube to try to find a tutorial on how to do these things and came across some videos. The first video I watched was very hard to follow, and the voice sounded like a child, it was also not describing how to do the things I wanted. The next video I came across seemed to be discussing what I wanted, but it was also a child and was very hard to follow as the music in the background was louder than the voice. Lastly, I came across an amazing video by ‘The Digital Arts Experience‘, which is a stream program for kids and teens based out of Westchester. This video was at one time a live stream by Emily who is the marketing director at ‘The Digital Arts Experience‘. In this video, Emily creates a Scratch story while responding to questions. I decided I would follow her tutorial while creating my own Scratch story but would change it up to be my own in a way! This video was great as it was easy to follow and really demonstrated how to do a lot of the things I wanted to.

As I followed Emily’s tutorial or live stream my Scratch video really came along great! I feel as though I learnt so much from her video and would now be able to teach it to someone else. This process held a lot of ups and downs for me because of the fact that I was so confident about it at first, but then had no idea how to actually create what I warned to ?. I believe that the videos from The Digital Arts Experience would be great to use in a classroom. This video would be great to play on an overhead projector while each student has a computer to create and follow it. I believe coding is important as it shows what exactly goes into how your computer or digital device actually does the things you tell it or want it too. I don’t think I would have had as much fun doing actually coding, but I can say I am pretty proud of my Scratch video! ?