Scratch - term 2 session 5 - 07.12.2013

Hi Scratchers!

Thank you all for being there this last session. I hope you still like Scratch, as we have been doing some tricky stuff today! At the start we shortly looked back at what we have done. The main things things to keep in mind are:

Part 1: Santa Quiz

Looking forward what to do this last session, I had a bunch of things listed:

That is a good size list but we had used a lot of them before already. The most important here is using Lists!
Lists (and variables) are used to remember things. You can use those lists in your game, for example as a quiz. So as an example I showed you a quiz game. This game has all the items of the above list, even Santa moving across the screen, dropping a present for each correct answer!

This was a full game, with all the things to make it look good. However, the most important part -the quiz- is shown below:

This will run the quiz for you. Make a list of questions and a list of answers, and off you go! :-)
We worked on this piece by piece until the break. 

Part 2: A Scratch Christmas Card

After the break we changed and decided to look into making a Christmas Card. We wanted to make it look as if the Christmas Card was folded closed, and opened up after pressing the green flag. After some talking how to show this, we made 2 sprites: the front of the card (that you see when closed) and the bottom of the card (with the text). The front would have a costume (a picture) for each step of the page opening. The bottom page would just have 1 costume - opened up. 
By giving the front of the card a different color than the inside, it looked very good:

Once this tricky part was out of the way, the card is ready to be modified to look good. You can now add more sprites to appear, add some jingle bell sounds, etc. Nothing is impossible!

Link to the games in Scratch 2.0 online

Go to the Scratch website and look for user cobhcoderdojo to find these projects.
I will share these projects on Scratch 2.0 (in browser, online). I will put a link to the game on Facebook as well.

Scratch - term 2 session 4 - 30.11.2013

Ahoy there.
Last session was mostly about using a pen and drawing with Scratch. We used "go to mouse-pointer" and Drawing blocks to build a simple drawing program. Then, we learned how to make changes to the colour of our pen. Fairly complex project in the hindsight, and a lot of things to digest but I think you all can have a lot of fun with Scratch pen.
After the lunch break we opened a computer, so you could all see what is inside. We talked about processors, memory and harddrives, and as you could see it is not that complicated as it seems. Of course, to build a computer from scratch, using transistors, would take us a very long time, but using parts you can buy in a shop it is a matter of hours really.
As a bonus project we started a classic Scratch game - car racing, and we almost managed to finish it in time. As a reminder, this is what we were trying to build:

We did not have timers and lap counters, but the basic mechanics was there. I hope that some of you will be able to finish this game and show it off next week.

In the meantime, back-of-the-room group built their scratch stories and a track avoiding game, which was quite complex and involved a lot of good thinking, with animated background and wonderful collisions.

It was quite a good session after all, happy coding....
J