Project Description: In this project, I created flower gardens (specifically the English and the French, those are at the end). First, I started at the bottom of the stem and went up halfway to the leaves, then go up again to the petals at the top of the flower, and the petals. I created 4 custom blocks and named them: “initialize”, “make stem part”, “make leaves”, reused “make stem part”, and make petals”. The drawing of the whole flower starts when clicking on the green flag. After clicking the 2 key, the user is asked how many flowers they want (e.g., 1 through 5), and then the asked-for number of flowers is created. After dabbling with parameters, I used custom blocks to create a flower garden when the 4 key on the keyboard is clicked, made up of a random number of flowers (at least 5), each one of them with different leaves (different size, color), stems (different length, width, color), and petals (different number, size, color), and positioned in different locations in the garden (on the stage). When the 5, key is clicked the French garden appears, too. Lastly, I added another sprite, and used this sprite to create a different kind of flower, when the g key on the keyboard is clicked, using geometric shapes, for petals and leaves (instead of costumes).
Project Link: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1146302867
Strengths of this work/project
Some strengths of my project were the use of parameters, repeat loops and custom blocks to keep my code concise.
I also tried to use funny colors and goofy designs to make my geometric flower look cool
Lastly, I added extra features to my geometric flower and organized my code with their definitions to make it easy to understand
Opportunities to improve this work/project
Instead of asking the user how many flowers they wanted, I could have asked what the size of the flowers they wanted
It would be better to be more organized and appealing if my flowers were more symmetrical and organized for the gardens, if I took the approach above
I could find the perfect proportions of the random size of petals to the perfect alignment on the screen with the other random-sized flowers.
Understandings you gained from this work/project
Some insight I gained from this project were that you can set parameters in Scratch, and how to use custom blocks as well. After learning a bit about the custom blocks, I thought that they were like variables because they hold a definition but are respresented in a much shorter way. This project helped me understand how to coordinate custom blocks in each of the sprites and to create meaningful messages on the custom blocks. It taught me how to move step by step in the code to find an issue and how to create a proper initialization.
Limitations of this work/project
Somethings that I didn't understand were the glitches in asking the user, and how to find a bug in a bunch of code, and I spent a long time struggling until I was far behind (but thank you Mr. Mark and Joseph for your insight and being patient with me:)). I believe that there are some glitches with the size of the flower petals in the gardens.