New Year, New Scratch

Creative Coders Club on Monday was one of our best sessions ever.  The kids were really creative and funny and fun to work with.  The kids that came were all returnees and familiar with Scratch.  It was their first time working with Scratch 3.0 and despite a few grumblings about where familiar tools went, they were able to create some creative projects.  For such young people, they really seem upset about the changes to their coding environment.  I’m sure they will get used to the new version and not look back.

When I was looking for a project this month I noticed the tutorial from Cartoon Network on Animating an Adventure Game.  I knew the Creative Coders had been wanting to make an adventure-type game.  I added this option to our January studio and went through the tutorial myself so I could field any issues.  It has some fun character Sprites but turns out to be a simple “collect the gems” game. I felt it was a nice option for the club.

I also looked at the Scratch Design Studio for January.  I’ve been looking at the prompts each month since the Scratch Conference in August, hoping to find one that would work for this club.  The current theme is the Year 3000.  I felt it would really bring out their imagination and creativity.

I started out our meeting with a “Happy New Year” and a question for them. Did things seem different now that it was 2019 or did things just seem the same?  I told them that when I was their age, computers weren’t for kids and that 500 years ago books weren’t for kids either.  Then we brainstormed about what the year 3000 would be like.  That was the first hook.

Then I read them the Scratch Design Studio description.  I really liked some of the questions it asks, like what will food be? like or how will we dance?  It sparks the imagination. They shared their ideas and I had a difficult time getting them to not share all at once.

Next, I showed them the project I made about the year 3000.

My sample Year 3000 project

The other hook was the text-to-speech extension in Scratch 3.0.  I had read that some of the tools from Scratch 2.0 – like music and pen blocks – had been moved into the extensions section.  When I went looking, I found the text-to-speech extension.  It is easy to implement and works great.

 

I knew it would be a hit with the Creative Coders, and I was right.  (My only worry would be about the appropriateness of the middle school students – and I let them know, a few times, what my expectations were).

Everyone incorporated text-to-speech in their project and everyone used it appropriately. Whew.

There is not much time in an hour to imagine and create a project but the kids managed to work hard and when I told them they had only 10 minutes to get something ready to share, a few of them revised their big ideas into something manageable.  Two (of ten) said they would finish later.

In the last ten minutes, I showcased the projects they made and added to our January 2019 studio.  We laughed and enjoyed each other’s creativity and imagination.

The very funny “So boring” Year 3000.

Another very funny text-to-speech Year 3000 project.

I highly recommend trying out the text-to-speech extension blocks and the different voices.  It is a little tricky to have the “text-to-speech” and “say” blocks sync up (like closed-captioning) but is worth it to be able to see and hear the project.

I hope some of them submit their projects to the Scratch Design Studio and I hope next months SDS theme is just as fun.

Happy New Year and kudos to the Scratch team for a great new version!

Catch with Creative Coders

Last week I presented the Catch Game project to my group of coders that meets at the library once a month.  This group has a different vibe than my weekly Code Club.  Some of these coders are a bit older, some were in my Code Club when they were in 4th grade and we have new members each month.

We are also using online Scratch accounts on the library Chromebooks instead of Scratch 2.0 offline editor.  I’ve set up a teacher account and a class. Members can use one of the pre-set 15 student accounts or their own Scratch account if they have one.

Each month I set up a studio for them to add their projects. Then we can all try out and play their projects at the end of the session.   I’ve had a bit of trouble with adding studios.  Sometimes they have not been available to the students to see or to add their projects, but I think I’ve figured out why.  There are two ways I can set up a studio in my Scratch Teacher Account – under My Classes and under My Stuff.  If I can set up a studio inside My Classes, that will automatically allow my students to be curators of that studio.  If I set up the studio under My Stuff then only I am set up as a curator of the studio.  Interestingly, I can see all of the studios from My Studios. The difference appears when I look in the Curators tab.

We emphasize creativity in their project design and encourage sharing and playing each other’s projects at the end of each session. I like to display each one on the big screen as well, as we want to celebrate each coder’s hard work. So I was a bit frustrated when no one could see the studio I set up.  One student helped me out on Monday by setting up a studio from his student account and adding to it all the shared projects.

 

Catch the snowflakes

 

 

1000 bonus points for catching the soccer ball!

 

They are a pretty creative bunch and didn’t have much problem with the project.  One student seemed to strive to annoy everyone with “creative” sound effects.  Others were making the screens fill with falling pugs or watermelons.

One student asked about keeping a high score list.  I think I’ll need to look into that request.  I know I’ve seen instructions about that somewhere.

Game State – Game Loop

This week we tried out Code Club World’s Desert Race project.  One Code Club member used this for his independent project last round, so we had one expert.  We used his final project to demo the game. 

Desert Race is a fairly simple 2-person race to the finish.  The main concept in this game is setting a game state variable to control the action. In event driven games is important to control the allowable events – like when to start. And we don’t want anyone to cheat by starting before the start signal.  Setting up a game state variable, ‘racing’, like a Boolean with 0 (not racing) and 1 (racing) is the concept I was hoping they would take in while making a cool two person game.

Defining a Boolean for game state is the first step to building a Game Loop that programmers use when creating more complex games.

from http://GameProgrammingPatterns.com/game-loop.html

Scratch Wiki also refers to it here: https://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Game_Loop.

My fourth graders may not ever get to that level of programming here in Code Club, but it is a powerful idea. I have used this programming technique in (non-Scratch) games I’ve created in the past and found it useful.

I also made a quick version of the project adding a bit of 3D perspective with my Space Race project.  The racers (cat and dog) get smaller as they head to be the first to reach the planet.

The students made some nice games. Many customized their Sprites and a couple recorded their own “win” sounds.

This one below has some almost imperceivable pitfalls that send you backwards (the opposite of a booster).

At the end of the day a few students asked to be able to keep working on the Desert Race project for next week -they needed more time and were enjoying the project.  I think I’ll let them, but I’ll need another project for those who finished or want to move on.  So I asked one of the two girls in the Club what she would like to work on and she said, how about making an ebook.  I asked if she meant like an animated story?  I’d love to focus on animation more – there are some great techniques to making things look like they are moving – I love Tumbling Santa.  Also, I’m thinking I need to show her Bubble103’s Scratch projects.  Maybe she wants to make a tutorial (nonfiction ebook).  There are a lot of How To projects on the Scratch site.  I’m considering these two options for next week.

Also awesome this week was this project:

This student’s race project was lost when Scratch 2.0 offline editor crashed. He was mostly done and he lost all his code. Instead of recreating it, he made this cool project. (It is a bit glitchy, but neat.)

Tales of Hour of Code 2016

Hour of Code or Computer Science Education Week was well received by the school this year. Every class from Kindergarten to 4th grade had the opportunity to work on one of Code.org’s Hour of Code tutorials during their computer lab time. This is Code.org’s third year of promoting a week of computer science education and I’ve supported them each year by introducing these tutorials to my students.

This year Minecraft and Moana were the big hits, as well as Angry Birds and Star Wars.  The tutorial options are a great way to give students choice in the learning and they are so fun.  Students can’t believe they can play Minecraft at school.  I like the new Minecraft Designer tutorial.  I felt it gave the students a peek at the code behind the game and allowed them a lot of freedom of choice and freedom to be goofy.  What 8 year old wouldn’t want a chicken that lays diamonds!  Meanwhile they don’t even realize how much they are learning about how to program.

1st grade Hour of Code activities

I do like to see who has that algorithmic thinking skill and is able to solve the tutorial puzzles independently.  For 2nd graders in general, Moana and Minecraft have pretty difficult concepts, like algorithmic planning, iteration and events (in Minecraft Designer).  Some of them look to each other for help, sometimes I have to read the directions to them, sometimes I have to be Steve or the boat so they can see how it turns in place and moves forward.  One 2nd grader surprised me at how easy the tutorial was for him.  I called him a Coding God (they are studying Ancient Greek Gods right now). He thought that was hilarious. I hope he signs up for Code Club when he is in 4th grade.

 

In addition to general class Hour of Code activities, my three math enrichment classes completed their Scratch math games.  That’s 27 new math games coded by 8-10 year olds. Here are the 4th graders, and 3rd graders studios. This week they played each other’s games and gave feedback in terms of Two Stars and a Wish, as I have done in the past.  I love this step in the game engineering process.  The students have to take the time to notice and test each game and learn to give good feedback.  I’m hoping we get time to improve the games based on the feedback they receive.

I will leave the option of Hour of Code activities for the rest of December – making it Month of Coding at our school!

There are so many tutorials at Code.org/learn.  I may have to try a few myself. I’ve been meaning to learn Javascript.