For our second week of staying at home back in late March, the coding challenges involved bunnies & snowflakes, making our own sprites, translating hopeful messages into other languages, and more!
If you’re new here (welcome!), you can find the first set of Scratch Challenges here. Remember, Scratch is free! If you’re one of my students, you already have an account. If not, you can create one!
I still miss seeing everyone in person in our classes, but I am enjoying sharing coding challenges in this new way. Let’s pick up where we left off!
Scratch Challenge #7
Scratch Challenge 7 is inspired by late-March weather: click on the bunny, not the snowflake! When you click the bunny, the score goes up. When you click the snowflake, the score goes down.
This challenge also uses a variable, which is a way we can store information that might change. In our case, we need to make a new variable called score.
There are two screenshots for the answer to Scratch Challenge 7 since the code is in two different sprites. The first thing I had to do, was go into the Variables blocks, click the button for Make a Variable and call it score.
I did the code for Rabbit first, then I dragged it into Snowflake and made a few adjustments. In Rabbit, I set the score to 0, and I start the hiding & showing. If Rabbit is clicked, the score changes by 1.
In Snowflake, I took out the block for setting score to 0 (since I only need to do that in one sprite), I changed my wait times so that my sprites hide & show at different times, and I made the score change by MINUS 1 when this sprite is clicked.
My version is here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/378743866/
Scratch Challenge #8
Did you know you can make your own sprites in Scratch? That’s what we’ll do for Scratch Challenge #8. Go to the button where you can add a sprite and click Paint. Then be creative! You can draw yourself, Scratch Cat, Mickey Mouse, your favorite video game character, or whatever you like! You can also create your own backdrop. Add some code blocks so your sprites come to life!
So, there isn’t really an “answer” for Scratch Challenge 8, since we’re all being creative and coming up with our own sprites. But I’ll show you the code I used to animate my sprites. Cat’s code is pretty much the same, except he doesn’t have the say block and instead just waits 2 seconds before moving.
To make my sprites, I used a combination of tools: circle, rectangle, line, brush, and fill.
My version of the project is here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/379057390/
Scratch Challenge #9
For Scratch Challenge 9, we’ll have some fun with the colors of our penguins. Can you speed it up or slow it down? Send it backward? Add more penguins?
And the answer to Scratch Challenge 9! Did you figure it out? The secret is in the wait times. Here’s the code for the first penguin and then the similar, but slightly different, code for the other penguins.
My version here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/379419258/
Scratch Challenge #10
For Scratch Challenge 10, we’re going to use the broadcast blocks. When we want our sprites to react to each other, we can have one sprite broadcast an invisible message, and the other sprites will wait to receive that message and react when they do. This gives us a lot more control over the action in our projects.
We’re going to do a simple project using broadcast, and then the next project will be more complicated. For today’s project, when the green dinosaur is clicked, he broadcasts a message. When the blue dinosaur receives the message, he reacts.
Did you find the broadcast blocks under Events? Are your dinosaurs using them to talk to each other? Here’s the code for the green dinosaur followed by the code for the blue dinosaur.
Remember how to do this, because we’ll use broadcast again in the next project, which will be a little more complicated!
My version here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/379781241/
Scratch Challenge #11
For Scratch Challenge 11, we’re going to use the Translate blocks. You can add them by clicking the Add Extension button in the bottom left corner, and then select Translate. The language names are sprites– click them to have the earth speak a message in that language.
Hints! Your message and translation should be variables. (We talked about variables in challenge 7.) Your language sprites need to broadcast and the earth needs to receive the broadcast. Look at challenge 10 to remember how that works.
And here’s how I coded Scratch Challenge 11. I started by setting my saying in the Earth sprite.
Then in my language sprites, I set translation to the translation of the saying and broadcasted a message called translated.
Earth sprite receives the message, and says the translation.
Did you figure it out? You can add more languages, change the message, change the graphics, add sound etc. My version is here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/379650338/
And that’s another week of challenges!
Hope you learned something and had fun while doing them. More to come!
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