Reflection from iRLO

This assignment was especially frustrating.  It was hard to complete in a week.  While the daily homework of other classes to complete kept me busy during the week, and on the weekend I tried to get caught up on homework, and only found a little time to experiment in Scratch (and watch some online tutorials) I ended up having to work on this project from 8pm-2am Wednesday night.  I know professors usually don't understand how busy students are and they always justify their heavy load of homework by saying that we probably procrastinate or spend too much free time with friends or on other activities.  But this is not the case for me.  I am overwhelmed with school work and between class, work, hall government obligations and Latchkey duties, its hard to balance all of those obligations with homework and study time.  If we had two weeks for this assignment instead I could have spent a week exploring Scratch, then I would have had a better knowledge of it capabilities.
I found myself constantly revising my lesson.  I knew what I wanted the students to do, but couldn't find a way for Scratch to accomplish that.  For example, I wanted many different sprites with prefix or suffix words on them.  Then, the students could click and drag them to the Prefix Monster or the Suffix Monster and the Monster would give feedback like "Good Job!" or "Try Again."  However clicking and dragging would have been too difficult to elicit a response, so I changed my idea to pressing "p" for prefix or "s" for suffix.  This was also problematic because if the first word was "Pigs" and the students presses "s" for suffix, then all the responses from all the other sprites would go off too (so the Suffix Monster would say "Good Job!" 5 times, "Try Again" 5 times and same with the Prefix Monster) because Scratch did not know which sprite the student was referring to.
Eventually my program works now, but not as smoothly as I would like.  I'm interested to get my peers feedback and look at their projects to see how they handled some of the limitations of Scratch.
I can see the usefulness of this program for students.  i don't think I would take the time to teach them how to use it themselves, but I would like to design maybe two games as a review of the previous grade's skills they need to remember before starting lessons in my grade.  I don't think I would want to create more than that though because of the time it takes.  There are many available online interactive games to utilize, so I would only use Scratch is it was a subject I needed to customize the information for my specific class.