CS 1150 PEEE   Scratch: Animation

Overview

Hopefully, your familiarity with Scratch and with programming are allowing you to feel more comfortable as you program. This programming activity should expand your repertoire a bit and provide some fun. As noted before, Scratch is good for story telling, drawing, games, trivia/quizzing, etc. This assignment addresses the basics of animation which can be used in many other contexts. This document has two parts—the specifications for the assignment and information that should help you better understand how do to the assignment.

Activity Specifications

This activity asks that you produce a Scratch program that uses a variety of animation activities, some or much of it influenced by user actions (pressing an arrow key or space bar or ...) and perhaps user data input.

The program you plan and implement should meet the following expectations.

Remember the "pair programming" process as you work. One person types and the other person watches and corrects, questions, etc. After a bit (at most 30 minutes) you change roles.

Submitting your work

When you are finished with your program you will want to share it with the class by placing it in our studio. That process involves:

That should be all it takes to "submit" the program. Whichever partner submitted the program should have the other partner sign in to Scratch and double check that the project is available in the studio. Don't forget that both partners need to jointly complete the PAC assignment for this activity.

Note that you should always be able to get back to the project page or to the Scratch programming environment from which you can access the project page. If you joined Scratch, your projects should all be available and be saved regularly by the system.

Grading

I will be checking the programs to see if they meet the specifications (noted above). A program that minimally meets all the specs is at least "okay" (will get a C or better). Better programs will go beyond the the minimal specs, e.g., change/set sprite names, use non-standard pen sizes and colors, have neat code areas, comment code if helpful, use input from the user in the program, have multiple new blocks, use more than one parameter to the blocks, avoid glitches (e.g., extra lines, interfering graphics, etc.), etc.

Scratch Animation Information

Animation in movies occurs because many pictures are taken each second and when placed together on a continuous piece of film and shown the show what appears to be animation even though each image is a still picture. Animation in Scratch occurs by changing some feature(s) of a sprite, probably repeatedly (as in a movie). Things you can change to produce animation include (but probably are not limited to):

Examples

Some general examples that make use of continuous/repeated animation blended with user input for an additional animation are:

The task here is to come up with your own program that incorporates similar kinds of animation in some context that goes beyond the animation. Some sprite (as in the examples above) interacts with one or more other sprites in a way that makes sense beyond two sprites interacting for no purpose (other than to write some code).

Some examples of putting code together to do animation are shown below.

Note that you can have more than one script running at the same time or have one running and another that responds to some keypress and something happens for an instant. You'll seem some examples in class.