IHTechCamp

Day 2

Students continued on their first game in Scratch. Today we learned how to add blocks that can sense each other's colors and act as a result of certain colors. Students were able to program their car to sense that they had reached the finish line and to respond appropriately. For some students that is a bubble speech that says you won while others added sounds effects. They also learned how easy it is to copy scripts to other sprites (characters) in the game. Doing this allowed us to add a second player to our race with very few changes to our program. Tomorrow we hope to finish this project by adding a gas pedal and brake pedal via special blocks called variable blocks.

With luck we will also introduce a few other games and show some unique features that they might want to include in their own game.

The video portion of the class was a little bumpy today. We had a few technical difficulties with our Apple devices not playing nicely with our Microsoft devices. Students continue to gather their raw footage but today we struggled with some of the downloads. We did have some success once we switched to Google Drive as a solution. We should complete those instructions tomorrow and get our first edit completed.

We also showed sample projects to get the kids creative juices flowing about project ideas. I was little worried about the students generating ideas for their projects but boy was I wrong. As a former English teacher I remember students struggling with ideas about what to write about. Well, when it comes to visual communication they don't seem to have any struggle. We have a dinosaur discovery, a chase movie, a sci-fi zombie movie, a spy movie, and a suspenseful mystery/fantasy movie on the boards. What a creative group!

Not much time for pics today but we did manage to snap a few.