If you read my old blog post about Scratch, this is pretty much a super duper fun extension onto that! Just a quick refresher, Scratch is a website where people are able to create their own, original animations! You can draw your own characters (also known as "sprites") and cause them to move in all different directions.
Our assignment was to create our own scratch animation, and have it do a few different movements and/or actions. I was a bit stumped on what to even make, but then my best friend showed me a video of a squirrel, her favorite animal, and I came to the simple idea of a dog chasing a squirrel. I drew a simple background, took a pre-made dog and squirrel "sprite", and placed them on my masterpiece of a background. Next I made my dog sprite spin around when I pressed the down arrow key, think "hmm..." when the up arrow key was pressed, and make a barking sound when the space bar was pressed. There wasn't a preloaded bark noise, so I made my friend record it for me so I could use that! I also made the squirrel say "Ahhh!!" at the same time the dog barked at it. It was actually pretty fun making all of the actions.
That next Monday in class we were told that we were going to create a physical "switch" that would control the actions when someone pressed it. This switch was made out of materials such as paper, a Makey-Makey, wires, and copper tape.
I've never worked with coper tape before so I was kind of excited. We were taught how to use a Makey-Makey... it is basically a mini circuit board that you can plug into the computer and also plus wires into. First we started to create our switches. I got different colored construction paper and started to recreate the dog and squirrel in my animation.
As I was doing that, I also placed the copper wire on the back of the switch in a perpendicular position in the spot I wanted to press the image. We also had to have another piece of paper on the bottom of the switch with two parallel lines that matched up with the perpendicular ones. Next we plugged the Makey-Makey into our computers, then took one wire with alligator clips on each end and put one end onto the spot on the Makey-Makey that said "Space", aka the space bar key, and the other end to the copper wire.
We also had to take another wire and attached one end to the bottom of the Makey-Makey where it says "Earth", and one to the other copper wire, this would cause the animation to moved when it's pressed.
I did this two more times, for a total of three, for each of the movements my Scratch animation had. It was much easier to create the parallel and perpendicular lines out of the copper tape than I had originally thought! After creating the switches, we tested them to make sure they all worked, and then we went around and showed everyone our Scratch creations! Everyone seemed to love the dog barking at the tree, they even thought my friend barking was a real dog!! It was fun to see everyone's Scratch masterpieces and their reactions to everyone else's. I think that this would be a great lesson for all ages. I know younger children would be able to pick this us pretty easily. I loved this assignment!
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