On November 2nd my library code club met to create the 2nd project in Code Club’s new Look after yourself module. It was the day before the US General Election and I felt a butterfly garden would be a good project for kids to make for their stressed parents.
I had created a similar project earlier in the year for Scratch Month from one of their Scratch in Practice prompts How Do You Peace Out? I used it with my school’s virtual Code Club in May.
I created a starter project and put it in our Take Care studio. For the starter I gathered some garden photos that I found online in a Reader’s Digest article about attracting butterflies into the garden and added them to the stage for different backgrounds.
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/443868962
To prepare for teaching this I made this project. I was having a good time with making each butterfly have a different type of movement. I really like making interactive projects so I wanted to see if the user could have some influence with the butterflies – be an attractor – but without the constancy of simply following the mouse pointer forever. I added a temporary influence to trigger when you click on the stage, then all butterflies receive the message to point towards the mouse- pointer, then 2 seconds later they point in a random direction. I was going to make a time variable but then realized I just needed a wait block. There is additional code in the butterfly Sprites scripts that keeps them constantly moving.
I enjoyed having some fun with the challenge part of the project.
My librarian co-leader was concerned that students would forget about Code Club on that Monday and she was right. We only had two club members join us. One student really, really wanted to keep working on a project that he had previously started – from earlier in the year – and I let him. This is a club (not school) and he looked like he needed a chance to go with his choice/passion. He was surprised, I think, that I said yes because he asked me again, just to confirm, if he could work on this other project.
So, I only got one student example of a butterfly garden, but it’s well done.
Next time we are going to skip ahead to Focus on the Prize project – because it’ll be December and the project has present boxes in it!
This butterfly project is so fun I wanted to introduce it to more students. I have a 4th grade class that started Scratch in October – They did the Trick or Treat project and had a great time. To prepare, I added more garden pictures to my starter project. I also found some free nature sounds from SoundBible.com and added them to the Stage sound assets. We were only going to have 45 minutes to create and share our projects and I didn’t want students to spend their whole time gathering sound and backgrounds. It was also an opportunity to explain the Remix philosophy of the Scratch Community.
The students really enjoyed editing the colors of the butterflies- I showed them how to do gradient fill and how to stretch the shape of the butterflies, too.
We created three butterfly Sprites, each with a different movement style – a glide to random place, a bounce around the screen and a move in a circle. I also showed them how to code a “follow the mouse pointer” script. After that, they had a few minutes to add more. They asked if they could add non-butterfly Sprites. I said yes as long as it fit our goal to make a peaceful, nature inspired project – so still nature/garden appropriate critters – dragonflies, beetles, birds, snakes, fish…
Then they shared to our Peaceful studio and checked out each other’s projects. I’m really proud of how they turned out. I would try this project again with more groups.
My Code Club Journal 