Week 3
Adding Interaction to your Story
Weekly Summary
When I was a kid some of my favorite things in the world were Mad Libs and "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories. This week we will learn how to create similar artifacts using Scratch. In order to do this, we will need to learn how to ask questions of the users, store their answers, and use these answers as part of our stories.
Key Concepts
Lessons
Please watch the following videos which total approximately 65 minutes.
- 3.1 - [TASK] Explore our starter story
- This story can be remixed from this link on scratch.
- 3.2 - Using the ask block and setting variables
- 3.3 - Adding variable data to say block
- 3.4 - Using conditionals
- [TASK] Before you watch the next video, see if you can figure out how to make dogs have coats, cats have fur, and only lambs have fleece
- 3.5 - Dogs don't have fleece, version 1
- 3.6 - Dogs don't have fleece, version 2
- 3.7 - Concept/vocab wrap up
Assignment #1
When you have completed the lessons for this week, please complete this graded programming activity.
Assignment #2
This module focused on having the user type words into the program to provide input to the program.
It is also possible to use the keyboard and the mouse to control the game. While we won't use it in the main learning outcomes of this course, I think it is important that you also see how we can use Keyboard or Mouse generated EVENTS within a Scratch program. This type of control gets used the most in video games (an optional module in this class) but can also be incorporated in other places.
Please take 30-45 minutes to explore five Scratch programs and look at some of the different ways that you can use the mouse or the keyboard to provide user interaction. This is not collected for a grade but I still think it is an important learning element of this course.