Evelyn Wentlandt - App Inventor

The first thing we used when we started this unit was the MIT website, or the website of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It had some cool starter apps, like one called Hello Purr where you have an image of a cat that purrs when you click on it. This app is a learning space for kids to learn to code. The first four main games we made on our apps were called Hello Codi, Ball Bounce, and Talk To Me, and Digital Doodle.

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Hello Codi

Hello Codi was the first game I learned to make and code. By pressing a button with an image of Codi, a bee, a buzz plays. For this to work, Codi is actually a button with an image of a bee on it, so when you press the bee it plays it's noise. By using a series of commands, the button and the audio file connect so it all works together in a system.

Here is the formula/command that makes Codi's screen close and brings you back to the home menu when you press the connected button...

...and here is the command that makes the Codi button play a buzzing noise when it is clicked on the corresponding button.

Talk to Me

Talk to me is more complicated than Hello Codi. This is an app where the person playing it has control over what happens next. The player types in any phrase they want into a given text box, and then under that there is a button that says "Talk To Me." As you can probably guess, this says whatever is typed into the text box out loud!

Fun fact about T.T.M.-

An interesting little feature about this game is that, when the USB connects to the inventor, you can shake the tablet and it will say, "stop shaking me!" The sensor coded into the app senses when it is shook, setting off the text to speech call.

When the Talk To Me button is pressed, that sends a code for the computer to "call," or say aloud, whatever was typed in. This is the command for this cool trick.

Ball Bounce

Ball Bounce is one of the more fun games. You can fling a little circle around your screen, and watch it as it bounces off walls and corners. It is like the DVD screen animation, but with a ball instead of the DVD logo basically basically.

⬆️ This command makes it so that your ball doesn't dissappear out of the screen. When the ball hits the edge of the screen, it bounces back the other way. It never slows down, so this could go on forever.

⬆️ Here is the command that lets you "fling" the ball across your screen. Using this, when you click directly on the ball and quickly swipe your mouse in any direction you want the ball to go, it flies across the screen in that direction!

Paint Pot

Paint pot is an game where you hold and drag your mouse across the screen and it creates a line of color that you choose. The colors that you're required to have are red, green, and blue. I added more than that because I think those colors are boring. I added the whole rainbow (and black and white) because you can't really color anything right with those three colors. To make all the extras, all I had to do was copy and paste the first command for the red, green, and blue, but I swapped the color for different ones. I also color-coded each of the buttons. Along with being visually helpful, it can teach little kids or people who are learning English the names of the colors.

All the coding that went into making Paint Pot- even without all the extra features there are to add.

Paint Pot is basically just a digital coloring book, so I needed to add some coloring pages. I had a few options for those (pictured below,) all of these I got off the internet. The reason I didn't choose these is because pretty much all of them have too much detail and it's harder to color within the lines. The smaller your brush size it, the less smooth it looks since every line is a series of dots bunched very close together. If the circles are small, you have to go really slow so that it doesn't skip.

Digital Doodle

Digital Doodle is similar to Paint Pot in a way. The only difference is that you have one color (black) and you can just draw anything you want on a black canvas. There is no coloring page, only a white screen without any limitations! The advantage is how simple it is. Pictured on the right is the only code needed!