Introducing interactive elements
Animation with Scratch - Lesson 5
Objectives
- Use sequence, selection, repetition in programs;
- Understand and use inputs and outputs.
- use logical reasoning to explain how some simple algorithms work and to detect and correct errors in algorithms and programs.
Lesson Resources
Lesson 1 - Coordinates and Looks
Lesson 2 - Broadcasting
Lesson 3 - Planning the Presentation
Lesson 4 - Building the presentations
Lesson 5 - Introducing interactive elements
Please note - This lesson adds scope to take things further with your programming and is not an essential element, especially for younger students in Y3. If they need longer to work on their animations simply continue with that project working through the suggested order for doing things from the end of lesson 4.
This features covered in this lesson can be added into their existing animation project or done as a new mini-project, as demonstrated with the space quiz project below.
Introduction
Give the children time to continue working on their animations. Depending on the age and abilities of your students you may then choose to introduce interactive elements for their presentations; the ability to ask the viewer questions and require a particular response to make things happen in the presentation.
Revisit the ‘France’ example presentation from Lesson 2. Examine how the interactive questions work using the ‘ask and wait’ blocks in ‘Sensing’. Consider the use of ‘broadcast’ again, how does that help the questions part to work? These are examples of INPUTS and OUTPUTS, the response to the question is an INPUT and the response it gets is the OUTPUT.
Discuss the need for accurate typing and spelling when doing these as it will only accept the exact same answer you type into the script (note that the France presentation points this out to the user when it’s quiz time, it tells them not to use capital letters).
Get them to think hard about the type of questions they ask, do they lead to (only) one answer? Are they clear? Will they offer multiple choice? Try and think ahead to what the user might type as an answer (see eiffel tower example: ‘the eiffel tower’ and ‘eiffel tower’ were both included as possible answers as the user might give either of these answers)
Go through the process of building a question and answer script together and let them have access to a copy of the France presentation to support them if needed:
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/10217709/
Or, this space quiz follows the same principles of questions and answers, combined with some animation for fun:
