Teaching Scratch in Ananindeua

The room had no air conditioning, the projector flickered every twenty minutes, and the chairs were too small for half the kids. We taught anyway.

How it started

In 2016, a teacher I admired asked me a question I had no good answer to: “You know how to program. What are you doing to share that?” A week later we were scouting community centers in Ananindeua, the city next to Belém, looking for one with enough outlets and enough patience.

The thing about teaching kids to code is that they have no preconceptions about what’s hard. They just try things.

We landed on a small public library that gave us a back room on Saturday mornings. Twelve laptops borrowed from a university lab. Scratch, because it works offline and because the block-based syntax kept the focus on logic instead of typos.

What I didn’t expect

I had prepared lessons about loops and variables. The kids skipped past those in two hours. What they actually wanted was:

• Sound. They wanted everything to make noise.
• Sprites that looked like them, their pets, or their favourite characters.
• A way to share their projects with each other immediately.

The first real “Aha” moment wasn’t a kid understanding a while loop. It was a kid realising they could copy the project from the neighbour next to them, change one parameter, and watch the cat sprite suddenly fly across the screen instead of walking. That’s when they stopped asking for permission and started asking for ideas.

The lasting effect

Two of the kids from that group are now in computing-related courses. One of them messaged me last year asking about Elixir. I don’t think the Saturdays caused that — but I think they made it thinkable.

I still teach occasionally. Different city, different kids, same projector that flickers.