Getting Unstuck challenges

What's "Getting Unstuck"?

Getting Unstuck was a 21-day learning experience in July 2018 of small Scratch programming challenges for K–12 teachers. It now offers useful resources like a strategies list and challenge archive. Getting Unstuck is a project of the Creative Computing Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. (Text adapted from About Getting Unstuck). These Getting Unstuck materials are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.

Below is a list of the challenges, each with a hyperlinked icon for its Getting Unstuck Scratch Studio. There, you'll find lots of example projects by participating teachers. Thank you to the ScratchEd Team for this amazing collaborative experience and helpful resources. They are a great addition to ScratchPals projects!

Create a project that whenever two sprites collide, one of them says, "Excuse me!" and the other sprite says, "Certainly."

Display a flower each time that the user clicks on the background. There are at least three different ways of programming this in Scratch—what will your approach be?

Explore playing a musical instrument with Scratch through the "play note" block in the Sound category. For example, you could play piano notes 1 to 120 at 240 bpm, with 0.5 beats per note. What triggers the playing? What happens while the notes are playing?

Create a project that controls the appearance of a sprite via the keyboard. As just one example, you could create a project where a sprite gets a little bigger when you press the B key, gets a little smaller when you press the S key, and changes its costume when you press the M key.

Create a project that involves one or more sprites jumping or flying. For example, you could animate a bird flying through the clouds or a video-game character jumping across lava.

Create a project that uses the random block.

Create a project that uses the Pen blocks to automatically draw a pattern on the stage.

Using variables, create a project that counts the number of times something happens and responds when the count reaches a certain number.

Create a project that involves the touching color blocks in the Sensing category (i.e., touching color? and color is touching?). For example, you could have a sprite moving around on a colorful background, with the sprite behaving differently depending on which color it is touching, like in a maze game.

Create a project that uses one or more of the time-related blocks in the Sensing category (i.e., timer, reset timer, current [year/month/date/etc.], days since 2000).

Find a project that uses broadcasting and remix it. For example, you could remix this pass-it-on project that we started.

Make a project that includes three separate scenes that a sprite moves through.

Create a sprite that reacts whenever the mouse pointer gets too close. If you leave the sprite alone for a few seconds, it should react differently.

Create a project that uses the string blocks in the Operators category (i.e., join, letter of, and length of) for some fun wordplay.

Create a project that shows different backgrounds depending on how loud the room is.

Create a program that answers the user's questions.

Create a project that asks the user to type in multiple words or numbers, stores the items in a list, then does something interesting with the items from the list.

Using one or more of the and, or, and not Operators blocks, create a project that when multiple conditions have been satisfied, a secret is revealed.

Create a project that uses the cloning features of Scratch. For example, you could make a project that represents a natural or human-made phenomenon.

First, create a studio and add all of your Getting Unstuck projects to it. Second, choose one of your projects from a previous day of Getting Unstuck, make a copy of it, and revise it. What's something about the project that would benefit from more time or fresh eyes?

Invent a new Getting Unstuck prompt. Create a project in response to your prompt.




© Kathleen Fugle 2019.
ScratchPals logo and site graphics incorporate images from the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT Media Lab and the Creative Computing Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as well as UNICEF and World's Largest Lesson. Icons adapted from Freepik at www.flaticon.com.