Over the past several weeks, 7th grade students were given the opportunity to learn about the Progressive Era (1890-1920) while also preparing themselves to program an interactive scene about this important time period.
The Progressive Era produced many influential leaders such as Cesar Chavez and Alice Paul, who worked to gain rights for those that did not have them. Students were given choices of classes to attend, and they used the passports they created in art class to track their progress and keep themselves on task. History classes offered time to research and learn about specific topics within the Progressive Era. Meanwhile, Math classes offered time for learning to code in order to produce an interactive video on a selected topic within this historical time period.
Scratch, an online coding application developed by MIT, enables students to program their own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share their creations with others in the online community. Scratch helps young coders learn programming concepts such as strings, variables, loops, conditionals, operationals, etc. in a fun, interactive and meaningful way.
Throughout the project, students demonstrated creativity, resilience, and curiosity, which are part of our core middle school mission skills. The purpose of this multi-departmental project was to emulate real-world life skills, people are given the time and space to take ideas from a concept to a finished product.