CoDES Blog IV: Challenges Scratch Educators face in Nepali public schools

Language barrier for students

Students in Nepal use Scratch in the English language, at the time of writing this article. Those who struggle with English thus automatically struggle to develop an understanding of the Scratch blocks. One of the schools we piloted the course in was a Nepali medium school. The students there struggled to read the labels on the blocks, and formed a barrier to their engagement with the platform till the very end of the course. A teacher’s reflection is shared below.

The students have difficulty in understanding the text on the blocks. They struggle to understand the words and make sense of, or identify the blocks. Preeti had a similar difficulty in reading the names of the blocks and telling apart some similar looking blocks, such as got to xy, and glide to xy. She struggled to notice the difference between these two blocks despite a demonstration of the output they generate. It took two more repetitions before she noticed that the two blocks had different output on the sprite.

Below is the teacher’s reflection in a different lesson.

The students worked on debugging a project. They had to figure out how it could move towards the left. They had a look at the script but it seemed that they weren't familiar with the blocks being used. The main difficulty was that they couldn’t read the labels on the blocks. I asked them to first explore the blocks that moved the octopus to the right. There were only 4 simple blocks in the script and yet they couldn’t grasp what was happening.

Students don’t listen to teachers when immersed

Teachers often have trouble getting students' attention when immersed in these activities.

Mr. Ramesh has given time to recall activities from last class. The students seem engaged in building things and many don’t seem to be engaged in recalling. The projects they work on are boys playing football, scuba diver in the pool etc.

During the lesson on Sensing things, the teacher begins the lesson by explaining the x and y coordinates. Most of the students are engaged with their own projects. Only Samyam is responding. After explaining for some time, Mr. Ramesh asks “So did you understand a little about x and y?” Most students are engaged in making their own projects. Some students are partially following the instructions Mr. Ramesh gives, while also making their own stuff.

Delivering differentiated learning experiences

Each group of students are working on mostly different projects, which means each group encounters different challenges that the teacher might have to help them with. Also students learn at their own pace. Some students might lag behind and feel discouraged, while some get disengaged because they are way ahead of their peers.

The students were at their computers, busy working on their projects. HIma, as usual, was busy moving between the stations, helping students debug their projects. A few students are out of their seats, and one of them is Samyam. He says that he has already completed his story and thus doesn’t have anything to do. He moves in and out of the class with a pingpong bat and ball in his hand. He calls Mr. Ramesh to come and see his project but Hima, busy with helping students, declines. having nothing to do, he is playing with Supreme and Ashu. Them jumping around and shouting is disturbing the class.

Mr. Ramesh finally loads Scratch for the girl who had been waiting for the computer to boot. She asks her if she knows how to do the things he taught earlier in the class. The girl nods but it doesn’t look very convincing. He tells her to do things shown on the screen and leaves to look at other groups.

Some students like Manish, sitting in the front row, are playing with sounds. He had completed his work early and didn't have anything to do since. Mr. Ramesh didn't address his project as he was busy troubleshooting other students’ works.

Tech issues

Teachers are bound to be left frustrated with students facing repeated issues with their computer and the internet, especially in computer labs whose machines haven’t been regularly upgraded, and well maintained.

A girl calls Mr. Ramesh from the back row for help but Mr. Ramesh is busy troubleshooting Rajesh’s mouse problem. When Mr. Ramesh reaches the girl’s station, she shows him a weird problem with her keyboard. Some of the keys seem to have become mismatched. “When I press the G key, D is typed on screen,” she says. Mr. Ramesh seems baffled, but we soon figure out that the keyboard’s setting was somehow changed. Reverting it back to US style solves the problem.

One girl's computer isn't booting. She seems stuck with it. She calls a friend for help and when that doesn’t work, she calls Mr. Ramesh for help. Mr. Ramesh takes a look at the computer and suggests that she work on a different computer. As he doesn’t have an in-depth knowledge of computers, he often struggles in troubleshooting the issues students face with the hardware.

Another problem that’s not much addressed is that of the monitor. These displays in the school aren’t optimized for students’ eyes and are often too bright. The resolution isn’t very good and often puts strain on the eyes. The new high contrast blocks have been immensely helpful in this regard. These aren’t the default blocks though, and students don’t switch to them unless the teacher spots them struggling and makes the switch.

Teacher tip: Use the high contrast blocks for Scratch in monitors that aren’t easy to look at.

Diversity of student projects

As the lessons progress, the projects of students get more diverse and so do the challenges they face. This makes it difficult for the teachers to guide the students and give adequate time to everyone.

Students are constantly asking for help, with pleas for sir, sir. Mr. Ramesh struggles to give time to everyone requesting for it.

Mr. Ramesh spends too much time with individual students. He goes to help some student and gets immersed there for up to 10 minutes. One time he’s working with a student in the front row. There's a call from Samyam but he doesn't seem to hear.

“It’s difficult for me to approach all of them together,” says Mr. Ramesh to me in the middle of two columns.

“Sir please come here!” These cries for help grow more frequent. Mr. Ramesh seems engaged in one-on-one troubleshooting sessions with students, and often ignores calls from other students until he is done with a particular student. He has to move around a lot, explain things repeatedly(intro to scratch)

Towards the end of class, Mr. Ramesh is giving more answers to students compared to the initial part of the class, where he was actively scaffolding. Meanwhile students continue to show their projects to Mr. Ramesh, and to ask him for help. Aayushman shows his project where characters are standing beside a lake and are having a conversation. Mr. Ramesh says that one of the texts ended quickly and he wasn’t able to read it. He tells Aayushman to increase the time for it, and eventually enters 5 in the sec block for him. “You need to keep checking and rechecking your project,” he tells the students as a tip to debugging and improving their project.

“If I tell students to create their own stories(in Scratch) there’s too much variation [to manage.] But if I tell them to make something very specific, it’s a lot of restriction again. I must teach them individually.” Mr. Ramesh articulates his dilemma. When he lets students create projects of their own choice, he often gets bombarded with requests for help for their project. This makes it difficult for him to instruct the students collectively as each student has a different challenge as they are at different stages. But if he gives a common prompt, then there’s too much restriction. Thus he prefers to teach them individually.

A helpful way to tackle this problem is by utilizing peer interactions in the class. The rule of Ask three before me is extremely helpful in this regard. Another way to reduce this problem is by getting students to work in pairs rather than individually. During the pilot, one of the teachers had allowed the students to work individually on separate computers. In another school, due to the limited number of computers, two students had to share a computer. Both teachers worked with 20 students but the teacher in the latter case had an easier time guiding the students on their projects as he had half the projects to guide compared to the other teacher. In the class where students worked on individual computers, the teacher was able to manage things better after he paired the students and asked them to work on the same project. The students still built projects individually but they discussed together and worked on the same project, reducing the total number of projects in the class to half.

Students misuse internet access

Some students are always bound to misuse the internet access given to them during the class.

In one of the schools, some students are playing roblox, some are listening to music on YouTube. There are still 10 minutes to go before the class ends but students aren’t focused on completing their projects.

Passive engagement of students

It’s difficult to spot students who are passively engaging because it can easily look like they are working on Scratch. Only a closer look and interaction with them reveals that they aren’t actually creating things. If not spotted, this often leads to a learning gap for these students.

After Mr. Ramesh announces that students can either work on the game or anything that interests them, about half of them work on different projects of their own. Others, who were already working on the game, continue. Among them, two girls only seem to be controlling the beetle and not work on creating anything.

Not knowing things they are expected to teach

Most common request from the students is to make their sprite face the other direction. Initially Mr. Ramesh tries to help a girl flip the costume. It’s clear that he hasn’t done it before but he looks confident when he shows the girl the process. He selects different parts of the sprite and tries to rotate them, trying to flip. He struggles initially as things don’t happen as he had expected. Tinkering a bit, he manages to get the sprite flip to the left. He comes up to me minutes later and says “I didn’t know this was so easy,” laughing. He has figured out the button for flipping sprites. He then instructs the class on it one by one and on screen too.

It’s important for teachers to prepare well for these lessons. During the pilot lessons, we observed that the quality of the lessons delivered by the teachers was directly related to the amount of preparation they did for the lessons. Teachers who explored Scratch, went through the resources and planned their lessons were at much ease in the class. The teachers who hadn’t prepared much found themselves to be unsure, confused and hesitant to facilitate the lessons.

We recommend that a teacher new to Scratch spends 4-5 hours in preparation for a 90 minute class. Because these classes usually take place once a week, we believe that making time for preparation should not be a problem. Please remember that the quality of scaffolding you can provide to your students depends on your understanding of the concepts and tools. Preparation for the teachers means studying the lesson plan, student guide, engaging with the activities students will be doing during the lesson, and reading the educator guide to understand the challenges and possibilities during a Scratch lesson. An experienced teacher might need to give 30 mins to an hour in preparation for a 90 minutes class.

This article captures our experience of piloting Scratch in three public schools in Lalitpur through the support of the Scratch Foundation. The 72 students participating in the pilot were between ages 8 to 11 years old.

By Sameer Prasai

Sameer is a researcher & learning resource designer at Karkhana Samuha.

Challenges Scratch Educators Face in Nepali Public Schools