Walnut School students are Scratch programming wizards!
What is Scratch?
It’s a graphical programming language by MIT USA for students. It’s free and super easy to use!
Does Walnut School teach Scratch? How?
Walnut School teaches not only Scratch, but also the computational thinking capabilities which are the basis to start programming. Students cannot start programming in Scratch without knowing the fundamentals of computational thinking.
We know that it’s hard to imagine how something as simple as making a block move can help your child become more capable in the world around them. But we promise that it will—and it’s all thanks to Walnut School’s curriculum.
At Walnut School, their daily timetable offers a lot of opportunities to challenge their mind. Our students get time to do creative work because they are not stuck doing mindless homework and boring projects
Nikhil Karkare, our director, has been a founding member in setting up CSPathshala, an open source curriculum for computational thinking for schools. We imbibe computational thinking skills in our students right from the start. As a practice, we have also encouraged them to take part in programming competitions.
So what Scratch programming competition are we talking about?
Every year, our students appear for an inter-school Scratch programming competition organized by Vijay Vallabh School in Pune. Many years ago, Nikhil Karkare was also part of the original ideation team behind this competition. Vijay Vallabh School has done a great job in organizing this competition with inputs from the software industry. Notable senior people come as judges for this competition. The competition has 2 categories: Junior and Senior. The themes are usually unique to the Indian context, and hence very interesting to see (it also prevents plagiarism!)
In fact, in the past our students have won several times in this Scratch programming competition – and they all have one thing in common: their computational thinking skills were honed at Walnut School!
What is the status of the applications?
We have a lot of applications which have made it past the first stage, and have progressed up to the viva round. Nikhil Karkare personally interacted with the teams to help them prepare better for the vivas, with the teachers and principals assisting the students to improve their body language.
The outcome?
We cannot believe that these are young students whom we are interacting with! They seem like confident adults, with superb subject matter knowledge of computational thinking and Scratch, ready to take on the world! We will now watch them go confidently on stage and win the competition!
With such a planned learning system, frankly, we are not surprised. Our students and parents are not overburdened. They get time to work on their passions and competitions. Not only academics, but the Walnut Learning System offers advantages in all aspects of our students’ development!
Walnut School has consistently been participating (and winning!) Scratch competitions for a long time. Click to check out our earlier articles: