The Sound of Music - A Scratch Project

Hope the new school year has been going well for everyone. Sharing here a Scratch project that we worked on in the classroom before the summer vacations started. An interdisciplinary project, this one combines music with programming, and was intended to be a Father's Day gift from the kids to their dads. It came as a pleasant surprise that Scratch was having a similar theme that month (June 2016) for their Design Studio. 

Here are the sample Scratch projects that I created: one of my fav songs ever, Do-Re-Mi from The Sound of Music and the Carol of the Bells. Note that the sample projects are intended to be just a starting point to familiarize the students with the programming concepts that would be used in the assignment.

Aim

Create your own Music Project, using the instructions in the Sound section of Scratch.

Objective

Students learn to create their own piece of music using Scratch programming.

Catch the Star! - A Scratch Project

Over the past several weeks, I have been working with my child's classroom, focusing exclusively on Scratch! The kids LOVE it! :) We have been focusing mainly on game design, and of course, I try to make connections with the classroom syllabus at the same time. The class has been learning about the coordinate system and algebra over the last 2 months, hence the projects that I developed focus mainly on these two concepts.

I provided this sample program to get things started: Catch the Star! We went over the sample code and then the kids developed their own games using the concepts learned.

Aim:

Create a game where a sprite constantly glides from one end of the screen to the other (much like the chimneys in the popular Flappy Bird game on code.org). If another sprite hits it, you get/lose a point. 

A Musical Instrument with a Photoresistor - Scratch for Arduino (S4A) project

A project to make a musical instrument using the Arduino and Scratch for Arduino (S4A). The inspiration came from the theremin-like musical instrument project on s4a.cat

The version below uses a photoresistor. It is much simpler than the s4a.cat one and I have not used any LEDs either. I might add them in, as part 2 of the project.

A photoresistor (or light-dependent resistor, LDR, or photocell) is a light-controlled variable resistor. The resistance of a photoresistor decreases with increasing incident light intensity; in other words, it exhibits photoconductivity. A photoresistor can be applied in light-sensitive detector circuits, and light- and dark-activated switching circuits. (Wikipedia)

Scratch for Arduino (S4A) Project - A Food Detector

Here is a project to design a Food Detector - an interactive game that tries to identify the type of food among a few given food items.  It uses the Arduino's analog inputs to measure the resistance offered by different food items. I designed this lesson for our Grade 5 students, and taught it last week at school. The inspiration for this lesson came from the Pixelate game, that I found on the Arduino site. The class went really well, and the kids had fun playing detective with different fruits & vegetables.

Below is the formal lesson plan:

Aim

Different food items have different resistance/ conductance to electricity. Learn to use the analog sensors in the Arduino to identify different food items, with S4A (Scratch for Arduino) as the software development environment.

S4A (Scratch for Arduino) Project - Robot Car Part 2 - Indicator Lights

Continuing with the previous project of the keyboard controlled robot car and adding indicator lights to it... This is a really simple addition to the robot car, just a few LEDs to act as the car's indicator lights. And modifying the program to blink the LEDs on left/right turns and on reverse.

Additional materials for the indicator lights:

• 4 LEDs (preferably, 2 each in the same color)
• 4 Resistors
• Jumper wires as needed

Valentine's Day Greeting Card - programmed with Scratch

With Valentine's Day coming up, this week I decided to do a fun little Scratch project with my child's class - make animated Valentine's Day greeting cards. The lesson plan is meant to introduce the kids to the following concepts:

1. create animation effects by changing the size of a sprite
2. make clones/ copies of a sprite
3. position a sprite at a random location 
4. provide background music for the animation

I made this sample skeletal program to use as a starting point.

There are 4 sprites in my sample program - Heart Face, Greeting, Balloon, and Heart.

S4A (Scratch for Arduino) Project - A Keyboard Controlled Robot Car

A fun project to create a keyboard controlled robot car... based on the "Robotics: keyboard driven car" project on the S4A site. This to me, is a perfect example of an interdisciplinary project: there is quite a bit of mechanical, electrical and computer engineering involved. This project is being used by the Grade 5 kids in my child's school this year; the kids have been working with the Pro-Bot for quite a bit of time and I felt that letting them create their own robot car that behaves similar to the Pro-Bot is a great finale. So far, it's my favorite Arduino project. Below is a formal lesson plan for the robot car.

Note: This is a simplified version of the car from the S4A site - it just involves creating the keyboard driven car, minus the remote controller. This means the car stays connected to the laptop via the USB cable.