SCRATCH For Your Kids at readysteadycode.ie is a free SCRATCH Course designed by Seamus O’Neill. Learn how to create Music, Art, Design, Stories, Games and have challenging fun. There is follow up for code clubs, schools and home schooling with Game Elements, Magic Maths and ArithmeTricks. The website and all its content has been a lockdown time-filler since March 2020. There is much still to do and it continues as an open work in progress with everything on it free and easy; almost 200 projects and seven 3D-FlipBooks.
SFYK is a compendium of many of the author’s hundreds of shared projects over 10 years under Ready Steady Code and other Scratch personas. I hope you find the website informative and useful. If you love Scratch, welcome to club! Join the RSC-Scratch For Your Kids Facebook Group community where your feedback, ideas and participation will be very welcome.
Book 1
The Course
Book 2: Part 1
Game Elements
Book 2: Part 2
Magic Maths
ArithmeTricks
Post Primary Maths
Meet The Author – Seamus O’Neill
Seamus is a former teacher, trainer and Code Club founder/ mentor. His creativity as a maths teacher was a major contributing factor as co-author to the success of the Mathemagic series of textbooks and puzzle books which are still popular in Irish primary schools in 2022. In 2012, not long after MIT (Boston) released SCRATCH for free, Seamus saw its potential as an online visual thinking aid for children. He designed his Ready Steady Code (RSC) course for primary and secondary teachers with a unique Scratch plug-in. It was a personal achievement when the developers of Scratch in the MIT Media Lab (Boston) sought his permission to add his graphical vector grids into the Scratch backdrops library. These enhance Scratch as a teaching resource for Maths and Computational Thinking for its 60m users across the world
Seamus taught Scratch to teachers in Navan Education Centre (2011 – 2018) and his RSC course received official approval from the Professional Development Service for Teachers (PDST) Ireland. He published books, Scratch from Scratch (2014) and Scratch with Ready-Steady-Code (2017). He organised and ran Irish National SCRATCH Conferences in 2016, 2017 and 2018 with a follow-up event in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne NE England in 2019. In response to Covid-19 lock down from March 2020 until February 2022, Seamus has been diligently researching, developing and designing SCRATCH FOR YOUR KIDS (SFYK), which is this web site, two books and hundreds of resources. SFYK is aimed at the significant adults in children’s lives to encourage children to learn Scratch coding. Seamus shares SFYK for free, in the spirit of CoderDojo which he established in Navan in 2011 and mentored up until the pandemic caused it to close. He has several Scratch Studios and Scratch IDs mainly www.scratch.mit.edu/users/readysteadycode where he shares many more projects which he couldn’t include on this web site.
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I’ve been working diligently on SFYK for 18 months of the lockdown. Now in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic when Code Clubs were closed, I invite and welcome you to apply here to join the re-vamped RSC_Scratch For Your Kids (SFYK) Facebook Group. This group is for Parents, Teachers, Mentors etc. who are keen to support their children and each other in learning and using SCRATCH for and with your Kids. It can also support the adults’ own coding hobby for leisure and enjoyment. Download the free SCRATCH 3, A2-size Wallchart (in four overlapping A4-size parts which you can join together). There is a special section, Early Years Learning Support at the back of BOOK 1 (no coding skills are needed!) for parents and teachers to help with paper cut-out resources backed up with correlated Scratch interactivity. The cut-outs can be downloaded from this group’s files folder.