Our first Scratch lesson pack is now ready and available on the education section of our website. Consisting of four lessons, students will be introduced to robots and programming through hands on activities such as building paper prototypes of Marty the Robot.

Starting off with class discussions about what robots are and how we can define a robot students will be able to gather some basic ideas of how Marty can move, relating his movements back to how we move and how our bodies work. Students will then slowly move from giving instructions to each other to giving instructions to Marty - the only difference being that we have to use program code so that Marty can understand what we are asking him to do. Building up students’ confidence with programming by discussing how we test and fix our code, eventually leading to students having a dance-off with their Martys.

All of our lesson plans work with either Scratch 2 or Scratch 3, meaning you can use a variety of devices to program Marty including computers, laptops and tablets. If you are going to be using Scratch 3, be aware that it is in a beta stage until it is fully released at the start of next year.

This lesson pack offers a fun and unique experience to introducing students to the concept of programming as they will be able to see how their blocks of code relate to movements that Marty makes. Taking this approach to learning how to code will allow for the normally very abstract concepts of programming to be normalised and become a lot more relatable to student’s prior knowledge and understanding of the world.

Introducing Marty to the classroom couldn’t be easier, especially when all of our lesson plans detail which benchmarks and outcomes they address in both the Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland and the National Curriculum in England. Also included in this lesson pack are student workbooks, teacher guides, presentation slides, sample solutions and any other additional learning materials that you would need to carry out these lessons - we’ve got you covered!

Don’t forget to share with us what you’re using your Marty for in the classroom through social media, especially any Marty dance-offs!