Interactivity

Scratch Day 2012 will be on the 19 May. I’ve been working on a re-vamped version of the Computer Programming Class website. When it is finished, I’ll have copies of some of my Scratch Challenges, some Scratch units of work and the 100 Games Challenge up on the site.

The CPC site has a bit of an odd history. It started off as a quick challenge in an A Level class when demonstrating how Overture (remember that?) worked. We found a reasonably popular search term which it was possible to develop a simple site for – by the end of the lesson we has a single page, working site.

That was followed by an ugly site containing a few articles, mainly set up to show how CSS could be used to create a navigation menu.

The next incarnation of the website was provided by my Year 7 students. I like to give a makeover challenge for a real site – so that year, they got the opportunity to put together a new version of the site using a set of customisable templates and tools. For me, the most impressive part of that was the range of great ideas they had for a Scratch splash screen for the homepage…

It’s good to see some interesting news about Scratch 2.0 – in my previous post I mentioned re-working old scripts. As a fun challenge, I decided to re-work my old Flash games on ICTspecialist.com as Scratch 1.4 scripts. Partly because I keep coming back to my old viewpoint, that teachers should be given the opportunity to re-mix and re-work an interactivity so that it fits in with their scheme of work, rather than having to re-write their curriculum to incorporate a pre-written resource.

However, I’ve moved on a little. I’ve since concluded that it’s even better if they have the choice to edit – but also have a number of pre-written interactivities to choose from. And one day, I’ll get round to providing something like that on a larger scale…

In the meantime, here’s an example of one of my Scratch re-writes, I plan to have the ICT Specialist site completely re-done before the end of February – then it’s back to seeing what I can do with InteractiveStuff.org.

Learn more about this project

Embedding a Scratch applet to play on a blog is easier than you might think – provided you think carefully about what you’re doing.

You can upload your Scratch file to the your account on the Scratch website. Mine is at http://scratch.mit.edu/users/David_Hellam.

However, if you have created several slightly different versions of an interactivity, and you don’t want to clutter your Scratch account with them, you can host them on your own website.

There are two files you need – ScratchApplet.jar and soundbank.gm – full instructions are given in the support forums.

All I did was copy these to a folder on my site and placed my .sb files in the same folder.

Then I just changed two parameters for the applet code snippet for embedding Scratch files, so that the codebase pointed to the directory with my files in it, and the project’s value to the filename for my .sb file.

Here’s an example:

I’ve posted some further examples of my Scratch version of a sliding block puzzle on my math games weblog for anyone to see the range of ideas you could use this same puzzle for. I’ve also made reference to a couple of possible starting points for investigation for a Math/Computer Science entry to Google’s new Science Fair – if you have not yet had time to see the range of categories as well as the entry/submission requirements (not to mention the prizes), I’d recommend you take a look.

It’s website design time again in my Key Stage 3 scheme of work. Last year, I piloted something different to see if it would work. Actually I tried two different ideas with different years – both worked, but one worked far better than the other.

So, I’m going to refine this and see if I can come up with a Unit that other teachers can play with.

It’s a simple enough idea – giving an existing site a make-over. Last year, I took my Mathematical Interactivities site and discussed making a new homepage – provided them with screenshots and text, and ended up with some good quality introductory work – this year, I think we’ll do a whole site. I’m going to re-work ICTspecialist.com with my Year 8 students. As an introductory exercise, I’m thinking that my ComputerPogrammingClass.com website needs a complete overhaul into a Scratch Arcade and tutorials website – that will be the Year 7 project.

Over the weeks, I’ll post different examples of what I’ve done with my students and evaluate the effectiveness of each part.

The software I’ll be using is KomPoZer = it’s free, if you’ve not taken a look at it, I’d recommend you give it a whirl.