First day in Latvia. Arrival day, getting to know each other.
Second day – Team building day at Skujene Elementary school. Students get to know each other better, perform activities in teams so that they can more easily divide into international groups where they will code the games.
Third day – it’s time to start coding. International teams have to make games about climate change and how we can influence it. Students are divided into teams – one student from each country in a team, four teams in total. Some already know immediately who they want to work with because the previous day’s activities at school have allowed them to get to know each other and make friendships. Coding in a team is a challenge because SCRATCH does not offer group or teamwork (a team of 2 people can only be formed by experts who know and have tested SCRATCH very well, but not everyone here is familiar with this program so well), so this also needs to be solved in parallel with the work to be done. It’s not easy from the beginning, because the challenge is to work on the same game in fours, everyone wants to work, but it doesn’t work, because the program doesn’t understand several actions at the same time: someone doesn’t save, someone else’s work is deleted and other problems. We must not give up, must look for another solution. But the process is ongoing, ideas are formed and students are planning, thinking, and creating game characters by working together. Games, or at least ideas for the course of the games, are being developed.
Fourth day – The work with SCRATCH is going on and students learn by actively cooperating, thus improving their skills and developing 21 st -century competencies: communication, cooperation, critical thinking, creativity. For games are created separate elements, backgrounds and figures, which are planned and given commands to move, conditions and rules of the game are invented, several characters are made and saved to be combined later. Tries to save games differently, upload in one game started by one of the teammates – fails, deletes previous performance. One team member will have to do everything, but the others will give advise and help as they can.
Fifth day – The last day of mobility in Latvia. Students are finishing their co-created games via SCRATCH. All are saved and playable. The aim of the project has been achieved! The students collaborated by creating games in teams, discussed the global climate change problem and tried to find solutions to it, improved their digital skills by programming in the SCRATCH program, improved their understanding of different cultures and learned a lot of new things that will be useful in the future.
