Are you building a robot?

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/235902074/ 

Getting Unstuck Day 5 project, jumping and flying 

 Creativity: 

 I wanted to use a gif, as I learned how from another scratcher recently to import a gif to make an animated sprite. I also wanted to make more of a game-type project, with a score and a clear end-point. Often, the sprites I use depend on what I can find through Google Image Search :-/ So, NyanCat flies through space! 

Production: 

Lots of sprites, each with animation. It was fun and easy to make a sprite blink quickly between two or three costumes to give them more interest. Getting the objects flying through space at an appropriate speed and spaced out enough was also difficult. I feel I could still improve that aspect of the game. In addition, I did manage to make NyanCat react every time it got hit, but I wasn't quite sure how to use the "Touching sprite" sensor in such a way as to only react once, rather than continuously as the two sprites passed over each other. I ended up putting "Wait" blocks in my "If touching" blocks, but as always, I wonder if there isn't a more elegant way of doing this. 

Getting Unstuck: 

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/235825255/

Getting Unstuck Day 4 Costumes

Creativity: 

Changing a Sprite's appearance reminded me of an Alice in Wonderland scenario, where she grows bigger or smaller based on what she eats. My froggo friend is Alice, but I also wanted to play with another character changing costumes, as well as changing the background in response to events in the script. 

 Production: 

Used a lot of "broadcast message" blocks to coordinate the activity between all the different sprites. I also realized that if I wanted to run two parallel sequences (like talking and moving) that I could create two scripts that each start with the same event (green flag, or message) and that they would run at the same time. No more fiddling around with wait blocks. 

 Getting Unstuck: 

Getting Unstuck Day 3 Notes 

 Quickie remix of my own project, adding a piano note every time a flower is produced. The tone of the note is determined by the same variable as the size of the flower (between about 100 and 25). Had to round the variable, as tones in between whole numbers were not super pretty.

I also had another, more involved project, that involved playing all sorts of different instruments. However, that one disappeared (!) when Flash crashed on my computer. Turns out Scratch doesn't autosave! Oops!

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/235712536/

Getting Unstuck Day 2 Flowers 

Creativity: 

 I realized right away that if you kept clicking and adding more flowers, the screen would get really full so that there would have to be some way for the flowers to disappear or be removed. I decided that their petals would fall to the ground before they faded away. 

 Production: 

 Fairly straightforward with a bit of testing and iteration. Drawing the flowers with Scratch's drawing tools was not that difficult. I did run into a bug where the flowers wouldn't change colour each time I clicked, because I put the code for that inside the "When a clone is created" block, rather than before the creation of the clone. That means each clone started at the first colour and only changed colour once, so they all ended up at the same colour. Additionally, I had some trouble working out the code to make the size of the flower depend on the y-position of the mouse when clicked. I did have to use my math skills on that one to figure out how to make the size a function of the y-position. 

 Getting Unstuck: 

Click here to go to Scratch

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/235705525/

Part of the Getting Unstuck project. 

Creativity: 

I started thinking about a story where one character might say "Excuse me!" to another, which got me thinking about how Canadians are stereotyped as excessively polite. There's the beaver. American Independence Day was only two days ago, so there's the eagle. Those sprites I had to find online, as these animals did not exist in Scratch's library. A bit of fiddling to get them the right size, with transparent backgrounds. Where would a beaver and an eagle interact? At a lake. The lake background comes from Scratch's library, and the heron that's already there provided the "conflict" necessary for any good story. 

Production: 

A bit fiddly, as I mentioned, to get outside images into Scratch. As for the code, I am not convinced that there isn't a more elegant way to take care of the timing between the "thought bubbles" of each character, rather than just hard-coding all the glide, wait, and thought blocks. Likewise with the collision at the end. I used an "if" block, but I have a feeling that there are more elegant ways of accomplishing that little bit of interaction.

Getting Unstuck: