Owen Peery

Here is my day 4 challenge.

Create
Create a project that controls the appearance of a sprite via the keyboard. As just one example, you could create a project where a sprite gets a little bigger when you press the B key, gets a little smaller when you press the S key, and changes its costume when you press the M key. (Remember, if you get stuck, find inspiration and support in the Teaching with Scratch Facebook group, our list of Getting Unstuck strategies, or on Twitter at #CreativeComputing.)

Share
Add your Scratch project to this studio to share how you approached today’s challenge. Then, check out and comment on some other examples in the studio!

Reflect
Take a moment to reflect on your creative process in the Notes and Credits section of your project. What did you like most about your project? What would you do with it next, if you had more time?

What I’m thinking and doing . . .

I was stuck on this project too. I didn’t have a ton of time to work on this project. I know some simple things that would work, but I wanted to find something to learn or useful that I’ll employ next year. I could use different keys to activate different effects on a sprite. That is pretty easy to do. Then I ran across Mitch Resnick’s picture project and loved it. I could see students taking their teacher’s picture and playing around with it to learn what the effects do. I saw the chemistry quiz one which I liked, but I didn’t have the time to do a similar one for CS vocabulary. I decided to practice removing the background on a photo, mine, and just keeping the head. I want to teach this to students but I usually do it in Photoshop because Scratch can be buggy. Then I made a block, MoveLetters, so I could practice making blocks. I used the same block on all the letters, just the “Go To . . .” block for initialization was different. What I learned is that when you make a block, that block only appears for that sprite, unless you copy it over to each sprite, in my case, each letter in my name. Then I had different effects apply to my floating head when you pressed the letters in my name. The letters in my name also get bigger each time you press their keys on the keyboard. This project forced me to poke around to try to see if you can make a block once and then use it on all sprites without copying it over to each one. There may be a way, but I couldn’t find it. I was thinking of how variables can be local or global, can a block you make be made global and available to any sprite in your project?

Here is my project

Please follow and like us: