Advanced Scratch – Week 1 – The Movies

Movies are lots of single pictures shown very quickly one after the other.

Most movies run at 24 pictures a second!!

We can do the same in Scratch.

 

Question: If there are 24 pictures in one second, how long is each picture shown for?

Answer: in 100th of a second please…

You should have come up with something like this…

1 / 24 = 0.042

And we can code this in scratch like this:

 

 

And to keep things nice and neat, we can use a Broadcast to tell the Sprite to move

Now you don’t need to change this code anymore…

So what kind of Sprite  are we going to have and how will it move?

Well for this demonstration we are going to use a Wheel, it can be of any style, but one with spokes works best to demonstrate the Wagon Wheel effect.

Wheels, are circular 🙂 and circles have 360 degrees, if a wheel turns a full 360 degrees between each frame, then it will appear to stand still.

Some more Maths! Depending upon the number of Spokes in your wheel you can get different effects.

Lets start with one Spoke!

And to make things interesting we will create avariable so we can turn it by different degrees quite easily.

So we set it up to recieve the broadcast from the Movie Machine and turn round by a certain amount each time.

In the example above I have used the variable, but you don’t have to you can just put in a number.

Try the following numbers and see what effect you get:

90 – what do you see?

180 – what do you see?

360 – what do you see?

And if you want to get real fancy and use a variable, you can add the variable, and the following code to adjust whilst the program is running.

What next?

Try numbers very close to the ones above…

Try a wheel with different numbers of spokes and different numbers…

Remember the games we did last year? You could add a spinning ball…

 

CoderDojo Athenry: Introduction to our Second Season!

Three Streams

CoderDojo Athenry is restarting on Saturday 22 Sept 2012, and every Saturday after that, 12-2pm in Gairmscoil Mhuire VEC School, Athenry.

We held a well-attended information and registration session on Sat 15 Sept. You can click on this link to see all of the notes, in PDF format: CoderDojoAthenry-InfoSession-2012-09-15.pdf.

Our big development this time round is that we are going to run 3 separate streams:

  1. Scratch Beginners: ideal for ninjas who are starting out, or would like to recap
  2. Scratch Advanced: ideal for younger ninjas who started with us back in March and have their yellow belts
  3. Python Beginners: aimed at older ninjas, particularly teenagers

All streams will be in the same room at the same time, which may make things chaotic but will maximise opportunities for collaboration, interaction, and flexibility for people to try one stream and switch to another.

Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language, that is used in a wide range of programming applications. Unlike Scratch, the program code is are text-based, though it can be used to build graphical applications.

To receive email updates and notes from the weekly sessions, please make sure you are on the CoderDojo Athenry Google Group.

Some other points:

  • This is completely free! Nobody pays and nobody gets paid.
  • You can register by coming along any time and filling out a registration form.
  • All ages are welcome! Even parents accompanying U13s are welcome to join in programming if they wish (though you don’t have to).
  • More mentors are always needed, female as well as male.
  • Each week, bring a laptop (with wifi), your laptop charger, and some food if you wish.
  • Under 13s must be accompanied.
  • We will award more belts before Christmas – we will provide details in a few weeks.

Above all, be cool!

Michael.