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The Creative Computing Curriculum is a collection of ideas, strategies, and activities for an
introductory creative computing experience using the Scratch programming language. The activities
are designed to support familiarity and increasing fluency with computational creativity and
computational thinking. The changes made to this most recent edition of the curriculum include
images of blocks and projects, and minor content revisions to reflect the new Scratch 3.0 website.
This edition of the curriculum is now available in Google Slides as individual units, activities, or the
full curriculum.

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Creative Computing Curriculum

Download the entire curriculum or explore various other options below.

Creative Computing Curriculum

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Creative Computing Curriculum with Learner Reflection Pages

Creative Computing Learner Workbook

Background

Translations

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Unit 0: Getting Started

​Ready to get started? This unit is designed for those who are completely new to Scratch. From
exploring inspiring projects, to creating a Scratch account, to having an initial experience playing with

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the Scratch project editor, each activity is designed to guide you and your students through the
process of getting started with Scratch.

Unit Overview

Introducing Scratch

Scratch Account

Design Journal

Scratch Surprise

Scratch Studio

Critique Group

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Unit 1: Exploring
This unit includes a mix of structured and open-ended activities that engage students in exploration
of the key concept of sequence – identifying and specifying an ordered series of instructions. This is

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often a powerful moment for students: they’re telling the computer what to do, by translating their
ideas into blocks of computer code.

Unit Overview

Programmed to Dance

Step-By-Step

10 Blocks

My Studio

Debug It!

About Me

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Unit 2: Animations
​Inspired by the theatre metaphor, this unit’s arts-themed activities are designed to help students
explore the computational concepts of loops, events, and parallelism, culminating in the design of
personalized music videos.

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Unit Overview

Performing Scripts

Build-A-Band

Orange Square, Purple Circle

It's Alive!

Debug It!

Music Video

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Unit 3: Stories
This unit focuses on helping students develop their storytelling and remixing abilities through a
variety of hands-on and off-computer design activities, providing opportunities for students to work
collaboratively and build on the creative work of others. Building on initial experiences from Unit 2,

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the activities in this unit are designed to help students develop deeper fluency in the computational
concepts of events and parallelism and the computational practices of experimenting and iterating,
and reusing and remixing.

Unit Overview

Characters

Conversations

Scenes

Debug It!

Creature Construction

Pass It On

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Unit 4: Games
In this unit, learners will become game designers and experience creating their own game project.
Guided by the activities in this unit, students will be introduced to game mechanics and game

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development while building understandings of conditionals, operators, data, and the computational
practices of abstracting and modularizing.

Unit Overview

Dream Game List

Starter Games

Score

Extensions

Interactions

Debug It!

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Unit 5: Diving Deeper

Rather than focusing on a particular theme or genre like the three previous units, this unit is intended
to create a space for reviewing and reflecting on prior work. This unit’s activities are especially

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flexible, diving deeper into creative computing by revisiting challenges, extending skills, or refining
practices.

Unit Overview

Know Want Learn

Round Two

Advanced Concepts

Hardware & Extensions

Activity Design

My Debug It!

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Unit 6: Hackathon
In this final unit, students will build on their creative computing experiences by engaging in the design
of an open-ended project of their choosing. To help you and your students tackle this open-ended
design experience, we were inspired to frame this unit as a hackathon. With its ethos of embracing

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just-in-time learning and problem solving, encouraging iterative planning-making-sharing, and

celebrating a connected and collaborative environment, the hackathon is an ideal creative computing
culminating experience.

Unit Overview

Project Pitch

Project Planning

Design Sprint

Project Feedback

Project Check-In

Unfocus Group

Showcase Prep

Showcase

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Appendix

Glossary

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Standards

Computational Thinking

For Further Reading

Links

The Creative Computing Curriculum

is a project of the Creative Computing Lab
at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
​Contact us: [email protected]
13 Appian Way, Longfellow 334
Cambridge, MA 02138

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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