Surfing Scratcher

What are those Sin, Cos and Tan operator blocks? In this Scratch operators tutorial, I walk you through what they are and what to put in them. We'll also look at their alter egos the asin, acos and atan functions. We'll use the unit circle to help build our understanding and list to inspect all the different values. This tutorial will set you up to graph the functions in Part 2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQsMSamqDvM&list=PLSgUBfi51uld33-nckgzOb3f78mRHtODK&index=4

In this video, we’ll explore a high-level understanding of what a state machine is. A state machine defines conditions that certain somethings can be in. For instance, we can have a character who has a walking state and a jump state. We can define these states and play animations on key presses. I’ll define what states are using the familiar concept of traffic lights then transfer that understanding across to games and Scratch. Lastly, we’ll go through what’s needed to create the foundations of a simple state machine in Scratch that utilises the state design pattern. 

In this video, I walk you through 14 different ideas that you can use with JoyLabz’s Makey Makey. Most are suited for school and can easily be adapted. The cool thing is that all these ideas come equipped with an Instructable guide that you can just print off to complement the activity. We’ll tour around the Earth using Google’s earth.google.com/web which is just a stunning browser experience. 

Check out these 15 cool Makey Makey project ideas that you can use to jazz up your STEM sessions. Each idea is ready to rock n roll with guides on the Instructables website. Educators, get news and resources sent straight to your inbox here: http://bit.ly/SurfSubscribe

https://www.surfingscratcher.com/gifts/educational-gifts-for-kids/

In this Makey Makey basics tutorial, I’ll use inspiration from the book “20 Ways to Draw a Tree” by Eloise Renouf to make a graphite pencil drawing that is connected to Makey Makey. I’ll use the 4 Seasons as the theme for this piece. We’ll check out the YouTube audio library as well as Zapsplat for some sound effects to play with our art piece. Lastly, it’s time to synchronise our works of art with Scratch and bring them to life.

In this tutorial, we’ll create an adaptation to the game operation that uses a van as the subject and some van items as the objects that we’ll need to collect. We’ll use some conductive materials such as paper clips, tin foil and tweezers to construct our game. We’ll connect the tweezers to the earth connection and all the sides to the space button. If we collide with the sides then we lose a life. We’ll also create a place to drop the objects once we have received them.  

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In this Makey Makey basics tutorial, I’ll show you how to use Makey Makey to create a keyboard using Scratch. We’ll use sharpies and paper to create our piano. Then we’ll grab some conductive materials like paper clips, foil and copper tape. We’ll wire these up to the Makey Makey and associate these buttons to notes in the Scratch music extension. Lastly, I’ll play an Ode to Joy by Beethoven to demonstrate our working piano in action.

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In this Makey Makey Basics tutorial, I’ll introduce new learners and educators to the Makey Makey device. We can connect the Makey Makey directly to the computer as it is essentially a keyboard or mouse. We can immediately start using the Makey Makey, by touching the ‘Earth’ connection and one of the input buttons. The reason this works is because electricity flows through us from the ground connection to the input button. We complete a circuit. A circuit is essentially a flow of energy. With this understanding, we are ready to test and explore some other conductive materials. We’ll look at all things metallic, as they are fantastic conductors. These include copper tape, tinfoil and even a dense graphite pencil. We’ll look at fruit as well as water and play doh. Anything that conducts electricity will work. Some insulators (non-conductive materials) include wood, glass and plastic. Makey Makey is compatible with all major operating systems: Mac, Windows, Linux, Google Chromebooks. It isn’t officially supported on mobile and tablet devices. 

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This video is part 2 of the LEDdy Bird for micro:bit game. In this tutorial, we'll move the obstacles from right to left across the micro:bit. We'll then look into some collision detection for when our bird collides with the obstacles. If our bird makes it through an obstacle then we'll increment the score. We'll also create the conditions to start and end the game, so that we can have continuous and looping gameplay. Let's get coding!

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