5th Grade Computers Week 2

Hello again Greenwood folks! I hope the first week was a fairly smooth transition to online education and I also hope everyone is healthy and happy. I will be making a website for the Technology classes this upcoming week so that elementary teachers can simply link to it from their class page and we can avoid flooding you all with multiple emails.

Normally my 5th Graders would have completed their lessons with Scratch in their earlier years but a recent upgrade to the program has done some seriously cool stuff that I wanted to share.

These two lessons can be split up over the course of the week. Parents and guardians, it’s a good idea to make a free Scratch account for your students so that they can save their work.

For an easy warmup let’s do the following lesson in Scratch called “Animate a Character”. It’s a fun little exercise where students can make their Sprites do several different entertaining things! It is just a little something to remind the students how to use Scratch since we really haven’t touched on it much this year. This is actually a lesson I use with 4th grade but again, I want the students to re-familiarize themselves with Scratch.

1. Click on https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tutorial=all

2. Scroll down through the tutorials and click on the picture that says “Animate a Character”.

3. The tutorial should load. Keep in mind that all of the action buttons are color coded. Of all of the blocks that we put together, the first one should be an ‘EVENT’ block such as “When Clicked” or “When space key is pressed”. This lets the program know when to start the chain of events.

Now for the second part!

NOTE: THIS LESSON WILL REQUIRE A WEBCAM TO WORK. IF YOU DON’T HAVE A WEBCAM AT YOUR DISPOSAL YOU MAY SKIP THIS LESSON… but that would be real shame. This is seriously neat stuff.

The new version of Scratch has added some REALLY cool extensions. We are going to play with one of them for our second lesson which deals with creating our own AUGMENTED REALITY! This is technology this is used for games like Pokémon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

1. Parents and care providers; as I’ve said before, it’s a good idea to make a Scratch account for your student. It’s not necessary but it’s free and will keep their work saved for future reference.

2. Our first lesson of the week is using Video Sensing. Let’s go to the following tutorial.

- Follow the link https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tutorial=all

- Scroll down until you see a picture that says “Video Sensing” and click on it.

- The tutorial should load. This will show how to code a game with real time footage of the student interacting with their coded Sprite.

Students are not limited to simply what is in the tutorial! Let them experiment with all of the settings that they feel like trying out!

I hope this lesson is enjoyed by your student! It’s a great introduction to the world of coding that we will continue to explore in the upcoming years.

Cheers!

- Jason Barlowe

Greenwood Technology Educator

Greenwood Technology Support