This week, our challenge is to work on Animation projects. We are looking at two project ideas: telling stories and scrolling backgrounds.

To tell a story, we have two sprites with speech and pauses carefully timed so that they have a conversation with each other. I just did a simple knock-knock joke, but you could do more.

After, we worked on how to make a scrolling background, a bit like the scrolling demo example that is supplied with Scratch. We figured out how to create the appearance of left/right movement by moving a sprite representing the ground in the opposite direction. We also found out how to make distant background objects, like mountains, move more slowly (called the parallax effect).

Coding concepts that we discussed included:

1. Speech bubbles and sound
2. Timing sprites
3. Loops

Here are the notes from the day (PDF): CDA-S2-Challenge06-StoriesAndScrolling.pdf

Here is my Knock-Knock animation: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/cdathenry/2899125

And here is my Scrolling Background with Mario: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/cdathenry/2531497

If you would like us to send you the PowerPoint slides of my notes, get in touch via twitter or by leaving a comment.