268 - Dancing Fool

Day 268. Just messing around in Scratch again, I created this silly little animation of my head on another sprite's body. Just press the space bar to start the silliness. There are a number of animated bits that all run in parallel.

     

253 - Custom Form, Custom Quiz

Day 253. I've been teaching a lot of Scratch to my Year 5 classes lately and the teachers of those classes were keen for me to come up with some kind of assessment item for it. I haven't normally worried about assessing Scratch work because it always feels like something the kids want to do simply for the pure joy of learning rather than to earn a mark, but I came up with something anyway just to keep everyone happy. I would have liked it to be a purely practical task made in Scratch, but the marking and grading of that would have been rather impractical and far too time consuming. So instead I decided to create a 15 question quiz using the updated Google Forms and the Flubaroo Add-On script to make it self marking.

If you know any Scratch, feel free to have a go of the quiz...  this is a copy so you won't do any damage to my real one. I'll run the Flubaroo script on it later and send you a copy of your results.

The new changes to Google Forms are just fantastic and you can now make all sorts of customisations and changes to the look of the forms.

247 - Game of Cat and Mouse

Day 247. Flying from Sydney to Singapore today, those hours in the air are always good times to spend learning and exploring new ideas. Today I built this little experiment in Scratch. Basically the mouse moves based on a random algorithm, and the cat tries to chase it. When it catches the mouse, the score increases by one and the time is noted, and tracked to record the longest time between catches. The times are then dumped into a data array list and collected. The cat and mouse move to a new random start point and start again.



What I found interesting was that if you run the simulation for a while, (70 cycles in the example below) and then export the data out of the array, you can open it in a spreadsheet and graph it. When I did that and sorted the times from smallest to largest, the regularity of the curve was striking. As random as we think things might be, the scope of that "randomness" is fairly  predictable. There are no real gaping holes in the times.

The other interesting thing is that, while sketching and drawing are usually seen as the outlets for creativity, the amount of creative problem solving, trial and error and "what if" brainstorming that I do when I'm programming like this is far more intense.

231 - Bloomin' Marvellous

Day 231. More messing around and creating in Scratch today. This little Scratch program uses code to make hand drawn flowers appear. Click the big green flag button to begin, then every time you click on the stage a new flower variant appears. There is randomness in the size and colour of the flowers. Press C to clear the garden and start again.

230 - Racing Beetles

Day 230. I ran a Scratch session at the III conference on Friday and we made a simple racing game using some random numbers to control the speed. I was playing with that idea a bit further today and made this new improved version that has a few extra bits.

Press the green flag to begin then the Spacebar to start the race, R to reset it, and Z to zero the scores. This could be used to learn about probability, as well as a number of other mathematical ideas.