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Reflecting: Design notebook question
What was a challenge you overcame in your last project? What is something you still want to figure out?
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Connecting: Six-word story
· The next few lessons will explore computational creation within the genre of stories.
· To get started, compose a six-word story about some aspect of their life on a sticky notes. (Use only six words to tells your story!) Post your story on the board in the room. These can be used later to make a short Scratch story.
Some examples of six-word stories are:
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” -Hemingway
"Rained, rained, rained, and never stopped." -Howard Waldrop
"Life is better in 3D. Usually." - Kelsey Watkins
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Exploring: Performing scripts
· Two volunteers will act out a series of instructions.
The instructions highlight parallelism (things happening at the same time) and events (one thing causing another thing to happen).
1- Have one person do one thing (like walk across the room).
2- Have that person “reset.” (Start over.)
3- Have that person do two things simultaneously (like walk across the room and talk).
4- Add the second person, by having the second person simultaneously (but independently) do a task, like talking.
5- Have the second person do a dependent task, like responding to the first person instead of talking over.
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Reflecting: All together now
· After the five “scripts” are performed, discuss the experience with the several other students. Try to answer these questions.
o What were the different ways in which things were happening at the same time?
o What are the mechanisms that enable parallelism in Scratch?
o What are the different ways that actions were triggered?
What are the mechanisms for events in Scratch?
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Several weighty ideas are explored in this activity.
First, the notion of reset is something Scratchers struggle with as they get started.
You program everything in Scratch and if you want things to start in a particular location, with a particular orientation, etc., you are completely responsible for those setup steps.
Second, there are multiple levels of parallelism with Scratch.
A single sprite can do multiple things at once, and multiple sprites can also perform actions simultaneously.
Finally, there are different approaches to coordinating action within/across sprites.
Many beginners use a central event (like the green flag) and wait blocks to control timing – there is a lot of power and excitement in learning the “broadcast” and “when I receive” block pair.
