We are going to revisit one of the topics we did earlier in the year. Do you remember The Movies, where we had the spinning wheel looking like it was going backwards?

Well we are going to do something similar over the next couple of weeks, where we will investigate and use Stop Motion, this is the same movie making technique that the Wallace and Grommet Movies are made with.

So what are we going to learn, well, we are going ot use a lot of techniques we have used before, so it is more a case of what are we going to re-learn.

• Broadcasts – to make our code smaller and neater
• Variables to simplify the code, specifically local variables.
• Speech Bubbles.
• Program Flow, there are a lot of things that need to happen and we need them to happen in the right order.

We are going to animate The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf.

As you know this is a little story and in stories, things happen one after the other, so that is what we need our code to do as well, there is not much point having everything running from a Green Flag, we need some way to control the flow of the Program.

First we are going to need some Sprites though.

1. A Wolf
2. Pig One
3. Pig Two
4. Pig Three
5. Straw House
6. Wood House
7. Brick House

As you know my drawing skills are excellent, so I have come up with the following:

Nice aren’t they. I’m sure you can do better.

When the Story starts there is only the Wolf, One Pig and the Straw house visible, so all the others need some code under a Green Flag to get them ready, backstage, ready for when it is their turn in the story.

The Wood House for example has just a HIDE under the Green Flag, you will need to determine what each Sprite will need under a Green Flag control. Basically anything to get it ready for the story.

On to the Stop Motion Animation.

Stop Motion is where something is moved a small bit and then a picture taken and then moved another small bit and another picture taken, until the figure has moved to where it needs to be.

We are going to do something similar, where we will set up the x and y position of the Sprite in local variables and then get another piece of code to do the actual moving, this helps to make the code a little easier to read as it splits it into smaller sections.

Here is the code for example that one of Pigs uses to move to the next House

You can see how I have split it into smaller pieces and that I have used local Variables to set the x and y positions.

You will need to figure out where on the screen you want the Sprites to go and how fast you want them to go there, that will determine the numbers that you need to use when you are SETting the xPosition and yPosition variables.

As the Wolf is kind of the main Character in the Story, we control everything from his Sprite. We do one thing after another and if we need to wait for something else to happen we use a Broadcast and Wait, this will control how the code flows from the top to the Bottom.

Here is all the code for the Wolf Sprite

Now, my code is very scrappy, there are a number of BUGs that need to be sorted out, for example when Pig One moves to the Wood House and the Wolf comes over, the Speech Bubble covers the Pig, this should be changed really.

At the end of the day, you can make your Story as simple or as complex as you like, one thing that I can tell you though, is that the more time you spend on the project the better it will end up.

You can also do real Stop Motion with a Camera and Lego, you can then import the different pictures into Scratch as either Stages or Sprites.

I did one as Stages which is up on the Scratch Web Site and here is one of the Stages from it.

What are we going to learn this week:

• A tiny little bit about Waves and how clever they are.
• A pratical demonstration.
• Thinking – Yes, it’s tough, you will have to do that part 🙂
• Coding – Sine Waves

I will hopefully demonstrate how differnt types of waves behave.

I will admit, that I am not an expert here and will probably be unable to answer any of your questions, but you see that’s where you come in and start thinking about these things yourself.

A Pratical Demonstration.

What’s in the Box?

I will bring the Box and we can take a look inside, I might even have two boxes, you never know.

Thinking.

Hmmmmm….

Coding.

Remember the Gravity simulation we did, well we can do the same with Waves.

We will build a few Transmitters and a Receiver which can be “tuned” in to the different transmissions. In fact this would be an ideal Application to do using the Networking in Scratch. Does anyone remember that from last year?

Lets see how we get on, we might set this up with one person as the Transmitter and one person as the Receiver.

I have some of the coding done to Transmit a Wave, but will need help in building a transmitter and obviously something to broadcast as well 🙂

Ok, I know Iam supposed to put up the code before the day, but better late than never.

Here is the code for the Transmitter of the radio Waves. Careful with the SIN code has there are a few nested calculations there.

And here is the code for the Reciever.

What are we going to do this week?

• Gravity
• Speed
• Momentum

We are going to look at Gravity and how it works here on Earth. We will also be looking at how, when you travel fast enough, you can appear to defy Gravity, this is how Satellites stay in orbit around the Earth.

We will also take a look at momentum and how things behave once they are moving.

And in order to demonstrate the effects of Gravity,  we will build a Spaceship Game, were you have to launch yourself into Orbit.

Depending upon how we get on this may run over two weeks.

Now back to Gravity. If you  want to get all smart, there is a very clever equation that Sir Issac Newton came up with back in 1687. But we won’t go there for now.

Gravity is basically a force of attraction and the closer you get to something the stronger that force is, also the bigger somehting is the more gravitational force it will have.

It’s a very small force, it takes the whole of the planet Earth to hold us down.

So how are we going to show this in Scrartch, well we will start with a Rocket on the Earth, that we have to Launch upwards, Rockets produce Thrust, which pushes them up into the air. The Earth has Gravity which is trying to pull the rocket back down, but the further you travel away from the Earth the weaker the Gravity and so the Less Thrust you need.

I think I just spotted three Variables there…

1. Thrust

2. Gravity

3. Height

They might come in useful in our program.

We are going to try and build a Scratch Game that will launch a rocket into orbit. This mioght take us a couple of weeks, but should be good fun.

So lets try and write down the rules that we need the Game to obey:

1. Pushing the up arrow should fire the rocket and get us moving.

2. If we stop firing the rocket then gravity will start to pull us back down

3. The higher we go the less Gravity can pull us back down.

4. If we travel fast enough, it can make us appear to defy Gravity, that’s how satellites stay in orbit, and the Moon for that matter. But we will leave this out to start off with as it can start to get really complicated 🙂

To start us off I found a Lunar Lander Game that has some of the elements that we need, this will be a good starting point to  get us going.

To start off we only need a simple sprite, a ball with two legs, that should do for our rocket 🙂

What are we going to do this week:

1. Re Cap on the exam.

2. A Magic Eight Ball, Question and Answer Game.

3. Flow Charts – how to explain code with pictures 🙂

1. Re Cap on the exam

I though we might have a quick review of a couple of the questions from the Exam. There was one question that nearly everyone missed and I think it might have been the way I wrote the question, so we’ll just go over it quickly.

Question 8:

If you want two pieces of code to run together (parrallel processing) circle all the ones that you could use:

a. Broadcast

b Broadcast and wait

c. Green Flag

The Broadcast and wait will NOT run things in parallel, it will Wait for the other code to finsh before continueing.

2. A Magic Eight Ball, Question and Answer Game.

I thought we would use some of the List skills that we used in the Christmas Game to build a Magic Eight Ball type Question and Answer game.

So here are the requirements:

1. A Genie should appear from a Lamp.

2. There should be a friendly Sprite Character who will ask if you if you have any questions.

3. There will be a place to type in your Question

4. Questions can only be ones that have a Yes or No Answer.

5. A nice background to match your friendly Sprite

6. A random answer should be selected from the following list:

It is certain
It is decidedly so
Without a doubt
Yes – definitely
You may rely on it
As I see it, yes
Most likely
Outlook good
Yes
Signs point to yes
Reply hazy, try again
Ask again later
Better not tell you now
Cannot predict now
Concentrate and ask again
Don’t count on it
My reply is no
My sources say no
Outlook not so good
Very doubtful

I decided to use a Genie in the Desert, emerging from a Lamp to answer my Questions.

Here are my Sprites:

And here is my stage:

The Code is Quite simple, again I have used the Stage as the Starting point for all the Code as I think this makes quite good sense as there is only one Stage, but generally many Sprites.

First we have to populate our Answer List with the different possible answers.

Then we can let the Genie know it is time to do the talking…

Now, I added the Lamp as, we need code under the Lamp to get things started. I decided that you should have to rub the Lamp to make the Genie appear. Once the Genie was out of the Lamp, we will let you ask the Genie a Question.

The code, well you know how to populate lists, so I’m not going to go through that.

For the Lamp, we need to check to see if the Mouse is touching the lamp and the Mouse Button is down, if it is we will keep counting up till we reach 10 and then let the Genie take over. We can do that with a Broadcast. But don’t forget that we also want the Genie to appear out of the Lamp, so as we are counting to 10, we need to make the Genie grow.

This is what I came up with…

For the Genie, there are a few pieces of code, one to set him up, one to make him appear and grow, and finally the one where he gets you to ask a Question.

And finally, I came up with a third, invisible Sprite, but it allows the Giraffe on the background to say a few things as well. I came up with another list of things that he could say and populated those at the begining as well.

And I have been really kind and uploaded the finished Scratch Project onto the Scratch WebSite.