Two sessions:
1) Making a sprite move left and right with the keyboard arrows.
2) Using repeat function and pen to draw circles.
1) We built up the script slowly and introduced the 'if key pressed' piece. The group didn't have a problem doing this though the sprite slid so we added the 'switch costume' piece which made it switch between individual poses. The concept of a fraction of a second was also introduced when using the 'wait' command between steps.
To move the sprite right involved the concept of the x axis and the 'change by 10' piece was used. To move it left we had to understand the concept of negative numbers which some children were already aware of. They were able to adapt the right moving script to a left moving script. In the future we hope to adapt this to make a simple game.
2) In making circles we used the 'change by x' script again as above combined with a turn script, keeping it at turn 15 degrees. The pen up and pen down was explored by importing the drawing pencil sprite with accompanying script. We pulled it apart to see how it worked.
Children had to try a different number of repeats to see how many 15 deg turns made a circle. the nearest was 25, correct answer being 24! One child said there were 360 deg in a full turn and worked out that 24 times 15 equalled 360. One group made 10 36 deg turns but realised the circle was smaller. Adding the 'change x and y by' script enabled them to play around with multiple circles. They realised pen up and pen down had to be in the right place to avoid straight lines when the pen moved to redraw a circle. Some then moved onto 'change pen colour by' and 'change shade by'.
I saved some scripts to my USB pen drive, opened up on my laptop, ran the smartboard recorder while executing the script. the resultant AVI was imported into Moviemaker, trimmed, music added, saved as wmv file and uploaded. 4 examples can be seen above.