Twenty-One Things to Do with Scratch in the Twenty-First Century Classroom

International audienceGlobally, programming education for children is receiving widespread attention as a part of twenty-first century skills. Learning programming is not just about learning to code, but it also helps children learn how to learn. However, unlike traditional classes where students mostly learn from teachers’ teaching, learning through programing (in a broad sense, “making”) needs to be approached differently. To make programming education more successful in elementary school classrooms, students must be self-learners, and moreover, teachers need to encourage students to be self-learners by acting as facilitators, mentors, or peers (and occasionally as teachers). Classrooms have many physical limitations, and school curricula, especially elementary school curricula, have even more limitations, such as time and subjects. How can we introduce programming and making to twenty-first century classrooms?Upon its publication, “Twenty things to do with a computer” (Papert & Solomon 1971) impacted both teachers and researchers. In this paper, I will share twenty-one things that I have been doing with Scratch and the tiny programmable computer “Cricket,” invented by MIT Media Lab, in Japanese elementary school classrooms to maximize students’ learning through making, in over 700 hours of classes for 15 years