Making and Playing Computer Games With Scratch Episode 1

A while back I found myself downloading and playing with scratch, considering it as a possible tool to complement work I was already doing with Phase 2 students around Shape and Space and LOGO.  With a move to work with Phase 3 students I have been "encouraged" into the slightly steeper learning curve of using Scratch as a programming platform in its wider sense, resulting this term in a series of sessions exploring arcade games and working with students to use the tool as a basis for designing, making and evaluating one or two of our own.  I have decided however, as an offshoot of this and to support my personal professional learning to use some of the materials from Phase 3 sessions with my phase 2 ICT club as well, and to see how they got on.  Our first session worked really well, and I was impressed at how creative some of the younger students were with the basic scripts in hand.

The first Session involved students familiarising themselves with the layout of the tool's interface.  Following given instructions and scripts to bring about increasingly complex animation effects. Within the session students used the default "sprite" initially and blocks from the control, motion and looks scripts areas only to bring about 3 different types of animation.

• Activity one bringing about movement as a flip in position using an on mouse click event.
• Activity two bringing about continuous movement of the sprite from one side of the stage to another, with an image swap to add interest to the sprite's actions and a change of direction when it reached the edge of the screen.
• Activity 3 using four separate scripts, that on click or use of a keystroke would allow user control of the sprite to move it around the stage using the up, down, left and right keys on the keyboard.

 Within the session the following scripts were were provided for students to use.

Activity 1

As the students worked with the above script they discovered that the sprite didn't simply flip, but rather rotated as it changed direction.  The students were encouraged therefore to explore what would happen if... they changed the settings of the motion buttons highlighted in the image above.  Could they

• make the sprite mirror as it turned
• stand on its head 
• step forward and back?

Activity 2

Running this script, the sprite walks back and forward across the stage when the green flag is clicked, its moevement repeated because of the forever loop until the red stop button is pressed.  Again in running this script students were asked to explore the effects of changing the position of the motion buttons, but in addition to explore what would happen if we altered some of the variables in the motion blocks.

• Could we slow down the sprite?  
• Could we speed it up?  
• Could we make the sprite's speed vary so during some parts of the routine the sprite seemed to be moving faster than at others?  
• How did our changes effect the way he/she looked as they moved?  

What would happen if...

we changed the green flag header block for the

"when [something] key pressed,"

or "when sprite clicked"

header blocks.



Activity 3

Here students were encouraged to recreate a script that would enable them to control the sprite using the arrow keys, so that for example when the right arrow key is pressed and held down the sprite walks towards the right side of the stage. This example with the addition of a cap block will bring about movement towards the bottom of the stage by the sprite when the down arrow key is pressed.

Having completed one of the scripts the students were shown how to duplicate it and then how to edit the values according to given models values in the images below.  The addition of green flag caps to the procedures, meant that on clicking the green flag the program would run, allowing the students to control the sprite's movement across the stage in the up. down, left and right directions.  In effect they could take the sprite for a walk.

These were then tested to ensure that they worked, and then further edited if need be to correct them.


To engage the students in evaluating this Focussed Practical Task, they were asked...  If we were making a computer game of our own...
How might this set of procedures be useful
Where might we use them, and what might be happening in our game?
Following discussion several familiar gaming type scenarios arose

• Perhaps we might want to move our character around a room, perhaps colecting things.
• Perhaps we might want to move our character around a maze.

What seemed to excite the students most however was that they now had a working model that they could explore and play with, and this lead to our extension activity... 


Extension


Having copied the scripts and set a scene where the sprite could be moved with the keyboard the students now wanted to play with what they had done..

• Could they change the sprite or character they were animating?
• Could they set a scene for the character or sprites actions to happen in?

With the model in place the students 

• explored importing new sprites to replace the cat. 
• investigating how they could get their new sprite to follow the instructions they created for the cat.
• Adding an extra sprite and having it move using one of our earlier scripts at the same time as the original sprite.
• Editing, recolouring and changing the sprites they had imported.
• Importing image backgrounds from collection or from the web as well as creating background images  providing context to the action.

The session created a great deal of excitement and raised towards the end an important question we need to address if we are to make a game of our own such as.. 

• How do we get the characters to do things when they meet or bump into each other?  
• How do we get sprites to interact with each other?..

This seems right now a good place to stop.. As it was with the students... Leaving them with a cliff hanger and waning more next time, when I have promised them with this as the prerequisite scene setter, that during our next set of activities involving the use of "sensing blocks,"  we wil be creating a very simple game a "keepy uppy type" game.  This will involve creating a "paddle" and "bouncing ball" the first steps in creating our own versions of "breakout."  Hope you drop by for our next installment.

BlockCAD: Modelling Onscreen with "Lego" Style Blocks

I have had lots of fun playing with BlockCAD in between my other dabblings this week. This freeware tool has been pointed to for a while now by colleagues, with referals through feeds from del.icio.us and my colleagues on Twitter. Having seen it used in school on a Teachers TV programme this week I thought it was time to have a play for myself.

BlockCAD, is a computer aided design (CAD) environment allowing its user to build onscreen, 3d models using LEGO type bricks.

Screenshot From Anders' Corner of the Web home of BlockCAD

On opening BlockCAD the user is presented with an empty base board in the main design window onto which bricks can be laid. The dimensions of this board are not fixed and can be changed by typing the desired dimensions into text boxes to the bottom right of the window labelled base. To the right of the design window is a component gallery. To begin your creation, select your block clicking and dragging it to the baseboard. Clicking the left mouse button locks it in place. Rotating a block is achieved by right clicking the mouse before placing it. Within the gallery are a wide selection of blocks, that include many familiar components including wheels, windows, doors and so on. The colours of these components can also be changed by clicking the colour pallete above the component window.

I found that it was easiest to place bricks accurately if the baseboard was rotated to a plan view. Rotation tools on the tool bar allow the models you build to be turned through 360 degrees in both vertical and horizontal planes at any time during the construction process. There is no undo button. Deleting a brick requires the use of a mouse and del key combination. Pressing the del key before clicking on the brick in question, highlights the brick with a frame and hitting the del key again removes the brick from the model.

Throughout the making process the 3d model as a whole structure can be viewed from diffferent perspectives using the rotation tools. Using the capture tool, images of these various perspectives can also be captured and saved. Clicking the capture tool opens a dragable window that can be dragged around like a camera viewfinder to frame the image and view of the structure you want. These in turn can can be saved in a number of different image formats for use in other software environments.

I really like this tool, and as freeware students can access it and download it away from school too, opening opportunities for them to extend their creative uses and learning away from school. It uses as a model a construction kit type that we have readily available for students to use in school, and that they themselves may have at home.

The tool has obvious cross curricular applications within DT, where it could be used in the IDEAS and FPT phases to model outcomes and facilitate evaluation onscreen before students begin construction. If included as part of an onging design and make process by groups of students it could also be used through a cascade save process to track, monitor and present changes they make as a result of difficulties or considerations within their making processes. The images could be used in DTP outcomes for display or included alongside photographs in learning stories presented in Powerpoint or even photostory.

I also like the idea of the environment being used as a scaffold for onscreen instructional writing, mediated by talk. Images exported from the environment could be used to help students create and design new models, and frame instruction leaflets for others to use as reading tasks. Context, purpose and audience for their work. I'd like to add this to our modeling and simulation tool box and see what the crew make of it.

An Animated Short: From Wrapping Paper to a Digital Greeting

I know, I know, its only the end of November, but as we all know preparing quality work takes time. For the last 3 weeks I have been working with my students in the school's ICT suite to develop graphics for use in their own personalised and Desk Top Published Christmas cards.

The process took the students through

• Wireframing a draft Christmas Motif
• Editing this to create a final coloured design
• Copying and pasting this motif to create repeating patterns (wrapping paper style)
• And finally experimenting with how different background colours and colour sequences in their designs effected the seasonal appeal of their image.

My favourite file name has got to be "complicated," expressing the students view of his work, as he included 2 colours in his background pattern and developed a similar process in recolouring sequentially the Christmas trees on his paper. Mathematically the task provided opportunities to use flip and rotate tools in MS Paint, enabling exploration of ideas around translation, rotation as well as line symmetry. Linking patterning to these ideas also provided challenges around rule making, and requiring visual prediction skills, and editing to ensure all spaces within the design followed the rules we had decided upon for our patterns.

This week most of the students have chosen their "favourite" wrapping paper design and used design wizards in MS Publisher to create their card, including this design on the front, and some including the smaller design motif elsewhere, personalising the greeting. They are very attractive as outcomes and even the simpest of designs, when repeated have produced some really intricate outcomes.

One of my students, building on our units of work last year, has developed a real interest in using Pivot Stick Animator to tell short visual stories. It's been a bit chilly this week and during lunchtimes he has been working away on this.



Very imaginative and creative yet somehow "Pythonesque" or "game like," he extended his use of the wrapping paper design to form a background and structure for his story including characters, who navigate a maze of santa's sleighs, falling between gaps, or limboing under others, transforming as they move shapes from one sleigh to another. This has inspired some thought about how easily we could extend this project to use images we have already developed to create digital online christmas cards.

To make this movie

• The pivot animation file was saved as a .gif file
• The gif was imported to MS MovieMaker along with a suitable sound track.
• The gif was dragged to the timeline and sound track added
• After some editing in MovieMaker to get the look and feel right, the completed movie was then exported as a video file in .wmv format.

I have posted previously about this and you can read about it by following this link. The completed movie can now be played standalone in a Media Player, or could even be uploaded to somewhere like Google Video for hosting and inclusion in a blog or school website like I have done with J's permission here. So J and I will begin the festivities here early and with no apologies by wishing you all a very Merry Digital Christmas.

Stelarium: Open Source Planetarium

"

Stellarium

"
Found this in my feeds this week from Portable Apps, I have downloaded it for a play later, and was really intrigued by the visuals on the home site. Available as a portableapp this open source application, may hold some intriguing possibilities for home school learning, and anyone running windows xp on portable platforms. I am avidly watching the space labelled Linux at portable apps to see firstly what applications become available, and then whether or not they can be run on the Asus ee, from flash drive through the Linux distribution installed. Still a newbie to this.

To Type or Not to Type 5: So Many Fish, So Little Time!

The Open Source Tool "Tux Typing" comes preinstalled with the Asus Ee's Linux Distribution, and I and the students have had lots of fun zapping fish and the like while practicing our keyboarding skills over the last couple of weeks, heaven knows I need it. On my web wanders today I noticed that this software is also available for download and use with the Mac and Windows. You can download Tux Typing here from sourceforge.net.

Making a Portable Apps Tool Box

Imagine an ICT toolbox that you can carry in your pocket. A resource set that everyone could share for free. No need to beg that the tools you regularly and choose to use be installed on the platforms you will use before you begin a session. A cornucopia of hope?!*

On Thursday evening I found myself browsing Computer magazines in a Local Supermarket and drawn to the caption "Ultimate Portable Software, store top programs in a USB stick" on the cover of "Web User" magazine. With the Idea of "Anywhere, Anytime Learning," and the principles of "collect, store and share," firmly in my mind, from a funding grant bid this week, the prospect of having a potential toolbox that could be carried in mine or my student's pocket was an Intriguing prospect, and one I decided to investigate further through a visit to the core website, PortableApps mentioned in the article.

PortableApps are versions of existing open source environments, that have been redeveloped for download and installation to run from portable devices such as USB flash drives and mp3 players, and maybe even as the site suggests your iPOD. Once installed to the device, simply docking it with a computer and running the interface or application's .exe file the user has access to a set of generic and "familiarish" applications. Why familiarish, well this is a me thing, keen to try out the GIMP, running from my flash drive to edit the image above, took a little playing with before I finally worked around the process that would have taken seconds in the tool I usually use. This however is no hardship simply a quirk of the tool, and part of a learning process we go through now and again when engaging with something new.

Visiting PortableApps and downloading these applications today has really stimulated me to think about the potentials they offer from a curricular point of view, in terms of shared and common tool access. Since these tools are open source they are free to download, use and distribute under GNU licensing, which could have huge potential for us, as we seek to address issues such as home access to tools and the proposed "digital divide." These tools could potentially enable access to all students for the cost of a flash drive, to a tool box that could be selected from to support a collect store and share process developed through home based learning, and accessible on any windows based machine. So what tools did I think might be useful and download to my flash drive to play with:

Accessibility Tools

• On-Screen Keyboard Portable - on-screen keyboard
  

Graphics & Pictures

• GIMP Portable - Photo and Image Editor

Internet

• Nvu Portable - KompoZer Portable - WYSIWYG Web Page Editor
  
• FileZilla Portable - FTP client (our Website is not entirely web 2.0 yet)
• Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition - the award-winning web browser (love it and we haven't been able to run happily on our network yet)
  
• Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition - email client including RSS feed reader

Music & Video

• Audacity Portable - Audio editor and recorder
• MPlayer Portable - Movie player with support for most video formats
• VirtualDub Portable - video processing and capture utility
• VLC Media Player Portable - Media player that plays most audio and video formats
• CDEX Portable - My favourite Audio CD Ripping tool
  

Office

• Mozilla Sunbird, Portable Edition - Calendar and task management
• OpenOffice.org Portable - word processor, spreadsheet, presentations with Microsoft compatibility
• PDFTK Builder Portable - split, collate, watermark and password protect PDF documents
• Sumatra PDF Portable - PDF viewer

Utilities

• 7-Zip Portable - File archiver and compressor
• ClamWin Portable - Antivirus on the go
• PeaZip Portable - Easy to use file archiver and compressor
• PortableApps.com Menu - integrated start menu bundled with the platform
  

There has been considerable debate and discussion about open source versus commercial product use in education for some time, but the emergence and recent excitement generated by devices such as the Asus ee, developed around the Linux GUI and shipped with Open source tools seems set to at least for the time being reduce polarisation of this debate shifting our attention to addressing how we intend to integrate, embed and use these devices to enhance and change our view of home school learning. Using them initially as "collect, store and share devices," is how I hope to begin this process, with colleagues and students within our portables project. Exploring how we extend home school learning tasks, through the planning and creation of content for inclusion in shared school based activities using existing tools and online environments we already use and are familiar with. Providing a local, common and shared set of applications, in the first instance means that students would not be entirely disadvantaged by not having web access at home, as content developed away from school can be built on and shared through access to a wireless infrastructure and classroom based web acccess, or alternatively direct transfer to the network through flash drive. To enable this however the tools for the job must be available. Certainly the Asus provides a basic toolbox, but it would be handy to be able to run other more complex tools as the students become more familiar with the process, if we would like them to support driving innovation. Since current E Safety considerations limit access to the web 2.o world in schools then local apps are required to do this, many of which are currently not available through edu suppliers for Linux based systems, or Window's Mobile Environments for that matter. Portable Apps has a watch this space.. regarding Linux based versions of the applications they currently offer, but certainly these tools seem to me to offer enormous potential in enabling expansion of the tools provided. So in answering my opening question probably more a cornucopia of hope than a complete solution, but certainly something well worth keeping an eye on. In the meantime I will play with the toolbox I have just compiled, and continue to chew over some of the ideas.