Scratch Reflection

While playing around on the Scratch website, I was wondering how I could incorporate such a program into my classroom. Although I still need to find ways to do that, I can see the numerous benefits of using the program. Bloom's Taxonomy, and its newer, revised format, tell us that we need to move past lower order thinking skills like knowledge, remembering, understanding, and comprehension and toward higher order thinking skills like applying, synthesizing, and creating.
Certainly a web site like Scratch deals little with remembering and more with creating. To use Scratch, I don't have to remember long, tedious computer codes; rather, I choose from a list and manipulate those commands as I see fit. Isn't it more important that I am getting hands on practice, rather than storing meaningless codes in my head? Students do too much remembering these days and not enough playing around and figuring things out for themselves. To get kids started on something and leave them to it for a while only to come back to an amazing creation is one of the joys we should be getting from teaching. One of the joys is probably not giving out a list of terms, having students memorize, do well on a test, then forget all of those terms by the following week. These types of products gives students something tangible to be proud of and continue to improve upon. Not only do programs like Scratch tap into higher order thinking skills, they keep children engaged, push the bounds of their creativity, and make learning fun!