I teamed up with Emily Roberts, an AWESOME middle school ITRT, to have some fun last week! I went over to Moody Middle School with a few Makey Makeys in hand to work with a small group of 6th grade students. These 6th graders are in a program that helps improve the choices and reactions to various situations that arise in and out of school. We thought that this was the perfect groups of kids to work with Scratch paired with Makey Makeys.
Before I got to Moody Middle
the students discussed different situations that they might face on a daily basis. For example, their teacher gives them homework, the topic discussed in class isn’t something that they are particularly interested in, someone at school says something that they don’t like, etc. In the situations that the students came up with they could make a good choice, or a bad choice.
We started the project off by opening Scratch and having the students pick a backdrop that matched their situation. Once we had our backdrop ready to go the students picked a sprite to be their main character. We had to program the character 
to explain the situation. To do this we used the say block to make this happen. I then taught the kids how to use the broadcast blocks to make things happen in their program. Once we had this under our belts I let the kids go. They programmed events to happen using the arrow keys because when connecting the Makey Makeys for the first time I have found that using the arrows and space keys
are the easiest for kids to work with. The level of focus that the kids had was great! Some of these 6th graders tend to get frustrated and do not always deal with challenges in a positive way, but these kids we seriously rocking and rolling with this! I was so proud of these students for taking the challenges that went along with programming their story in stride!
After the students had their first situation programmed they offered two choices. If you selected the bad choice the program would take you a screen with a new backdrop explaining how the choice you made wasn’t the best. If you made a good choice it would take you to a screen with a new backdrop explaining how you made the right choice.
The plan was for the students to add even more choices to their program, but we wanted to break out the Makey 
Makeys before time was up! I know that some of these students went home and added even more to their program after time was up!
When we broke out the Makey Makeys and the students took off with them! They made buttons with Playdough and started controlling their computers. It was so great seeing them running off with this technology. I bet they will come up with some great uses for it!
I had a blast with these middle schoolers, and I’m hoping to get a chance to head over to Moody again soon to see how they are all doing!
