Walk into one of our Saturday sessions at Poguti Maribulla Primary School, and the first thing you'll notice is the noise — not chaos, but excitement. Grade 4 learners are calling each other over to look at their screens, debugging their first programs together.
Why Scratch?
When you're teaching children who have never touched a computer before, the last thing you want to start with is a blank text editor and a blinking cursor. Scratch, developed by MIT, strips programming down to colourful drag-and-drop blocks that snap together like puzzle pieces.
For our learners in rural Limpopo, this matters enormously. Many arrive at our sessions having never used a mouse, let alone written a line of code. Scratch lets us skip past syntax errors and get straight to the thinking — what should happen first? what happens next? what if the user clicks here?
Our Saturday Session Structure
Our sessions are delivered on Saturdays to avoid disrupting the school week. A typical Coding 101 session follows this pattern:
- 15 min — Warm-up: Review the previous session's concepts with a quick quiz or peer-teaching exercise
- 30 min — New concept: Introduce one new Scratch block category (e.g., Events, Loops, or Sensing) with a live walkthrough
- 45 min — Build time: Learners work in pairs to build a mini-project that uses the new concept
- 15 min — Show & tell: 2–3 pairs present what they made to the group
This structure is deliberate. The pair programming approach builds intrapersonal skills — something Mam Mothiba, the Deputy Principal at Poguti, has specifically praised.
CAPS Alignment
Our curriculum blends the CAPS Technology outcomes with our own expanded syllabus. CAPS requires learners to understand basic programming concepts by the Intermediate Phase, but it provides very little practical guidance on how to teach them. That's where we come in.
We map our Scratch lessons to CAPS learning outcomes, so schools can count our Saturday sessions toward their technology goals. But we also go beyond CAPS — introducing concepts like variables, conditional logic, and event-driven programming far earlier than the national curriculum requires.
What We've Seen
After one term of Saturday sessions, most Grade 4–5 learners can:
- Navigate a computer desktop and file system confidently
- Explain what a loop, a conditional, and a variable are
- Build a simple Scratch game with scoring and a restart button
- Debug basic logic errors by reading their block sequences
Perhaps more importantly, they start thinking computationally — breaking problems into steps, testing assumptions, and iterating on their designs.
What's Next
Scratch is the beginning, not the end. Learners who demonstrate strong computational thinking graduate to our Python track in Grade 6–7, where they transition from blocks to text-based code. The skills transfer remarkably well — a learner who understands Scratch loops already knows what a for loop is. They just need to learn the syntax.
If you're an educator in Limpopo interested in bringing coding to your school, get in touch. We'd love to partner with you.