Saturday, March 8, 2014

Lesson 54 - Straight Cat

Today we agreed to play some Lightbot together. But when we sat down, she wanted to do the Hour of Code first tutorial instead. Except not. One excercise was enough. Then to Lightbot. One excercise and that was enough. She wanted to do stuff with Scratch.

She selected a nice backdrop from the Scratch backdrop library. Then she started drawing some nice animal characters. The dog and elephant are cute. The cat and the mouse come from the Scratch sprite library.



The coding part was that she made the cat rotate forever. As in


The problem for her was that she couldn't get the cat "straight" again. So I suggested that maybe we should add another script that would stop the rotation when the spacebar is pressed. She was ok with that so I showed her the new blocks she needed and this was the new script.


So, in fact you can react to keyboard input in Scratch and you can stop other scripts from running.

Then I showed her the little game I had coded while she was doing this. She liked it, but quickly found it way too easy. Also she wondered why I didn't include any background music. We agreed that she'll make a similar game herself and adds a background tune too.

Not today though.

1 comment:

  1. *excercise > exercise

    is Scratch really any good? Feels super cumbersome when I try it myself; of course, I've already been conditioned to type things and see the structures behind the code... just somehow the jigsaw-puzzly contact points feel more like a straitjacket than support.

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