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Lesson 7: A Space Adventure

Here, we go back to controlling the character. But this time, we drive it, instead of just move it left and right or up and down. It’s another way to think about how to move characters in the game. I want to show a variety of different approaches to movement, …

Lesson 6: Drawing Shapes with the Pen

Scratch has a pen to allow kids to draw programmatically. This gives the kids a chance to play around with it. I try and have this lesson when the kids are going through some geometry lessons, to tie into their other work. Anytime I can leverage what they are doing …

Lesson 5: A Side Scrolling Game

Animation is a fun art, with a lot of good tricks and shortcuts. Scratch provides us a way to do many of them, but this side scroller game gives us a chance to show of some of the more standard techniques. The game itself is pretty simple, but the kids …

Lesson 4: Doing Some Math Drills

Games are what keep the kids interested, but I like showing that it can be used to make tools to help kids study too. The 3rd grade class I work with has a “mad math minute” where they try and answer as many questions on a worksheet in a minute. …

Lesson 2 continued: Sounds and a Shark!

We’ll add on the aquarium we built last time. First we’ll add background sounds to the aquarium, just for fun.  I don’t generally add sounds to the applications, because in a classroom environment, that can get pretty distracting with all the kids having their apps make sounds…but when you’re doing …

Lesson 2: An Aquarium

In this lesson, we’ll get a little more animated and learn how to move our sprites around the screen. They’ll move randomly, but from that, we’ll learn about how it can be semi-realistic. We’ll learn about how the sprites draw themselves, rotate, and how those two features interact. We’ll add …