Our Scratch Day 2023

A wonderful timing, a great team, and excellent kids leave a lasting impression on all of us who were involved in making it happen at Loding Primary School on May 12, 2023. Kids were excited to see us arrive to their school unexpectedly, but we were well prepared to engage in our Scratch activities.

Scratch Day is observed as part of Scratch Week,

which runs from May 8th to May 13th. In our club, the 12th of May is our Scratch Day, on which we simultaneously celebrate the birth of the Mpumalanga ICT Club and the anniversary of our DigiGirlz Initiative. "This day is especially significant to me as the club's founder because it is also my mother's birthday." It's a fantastic day to bring her love memory of her on this day. We used to celebrate her birthday with her after we had celebrated Scratch Day. 

This year, we integrated grade R -3 in our program. Our Mpumalanga ICT Club team treated our grade R to grade 2 students to Face Paintings. Their miniature faces were stamped with lovely motifs of animal prints, which children adored; some chose flowers, while others resembled the Scratch itself. 

We chose to give the grade 3 kids more hands-on exposure in the computer lab.

They were taught unplugged coding by making artifacts out of items such as paper plates, dough, pairs of scissors, sticks, stickers, and others to construct masks that reflect their own sprites in Scratch. 

Our final group was grade six learners who got a

taste of touching iPads and coding their own Scratch games. We first introduced them to the "Hide and Seek" game. They meticulously followed the game programming instructions to the latter. It was fantastic to see teachers and the school's principal joining the learners to observe the activities. Our Scratch Day party was a success.