Lesson 5 - Holiday Card

Winter vacation is near! Create a holiday card and share it with your friends and family.

Opening Circle:

- What holidays do you and your family celebrate?

- Some examples of cards: http://scratch.mit.edu/studios/279432/

- Teacher's example for today's project: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/92330434/

- Some Christmas Music you can use: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/90142416/ (You can drag one of these songs into your Scratch backpack, then open your own project, and drag the song into your own project)

Activity:

- Create a Holiday Card. We will examine the code for the teacher's example above.

(The original Holiday Card tutorial is for first time Scratch users. Here is the link for reference, but we are not using this today: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tip_bar=hoc http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/hoc/ScratchHolidayCard.pdf )

Goals:

Learn how Broadcast and Receive works.

In my example, the first page of my card is a game. You have 10 seconds to catch the falling gifts. After the game is over, a second page appears with a totally different look, and the text Happy Holidays! I use broadcast and receive to "switch" from the first page to the second page of my card. When my main sprite - the cat - finishes catching gifts, it broadcasts a message that is not visible to the user of the game. Some other sprites (the Christmas tree, and the Happy Holiday! sprite) that hide in the background waiting for this message now receive it and show themselves.

Here is a complex explanation of Broadcast and Receive: http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Broadcast

and here is a video example that shows how broadcast and receive works for timing a dialog between two characters (click on the last video titled Make a story under Introductory Tutorials) : https://scratch.mit.edu/help/videos/#

Extras: Learn how to

- set a timer,

- store data in a variable and increment a counter

- use cloning (in this case the gifts falling from the sky are all clones of one sprite)