Reflection: I found out about this course through a post on the ISED listserv and was excited to join. Our 5th
graders have used Scratch in the past with another teacher, but with the move to Chromebooks, it wasn't
possible to use it. The release of 
Here's the link to my 10 Block project for Week 1. I found this project very interesting. I watched Eric's project and looked at many that had been shared to the 10 Block Studio and was excited for the creative possibilities. I talked with my daughter and asked her what she would suggest I create and she suggested the horse theme. Well, we do live in Kentucky!
I originally imagined I would have the Scratch cat call over a horse and then somehow get on board and ride off. I went ahead and started looking for the pieces I needed first. I searched Flickr and found a Creative Commons licensed background I liked and then used a website someone shared earlier this week, FreeSounds.org, to look for the sounds I wanted. I had no trouble with any of that.
I originally imagined I would have the Scratch cat call over a horse and then somehow get on board and ride off. I went ahead and started looking for the pieces I needed first. I searched Flickr and found a Creative Commons licensed background I liked and then used a website someone shared earlier this week, FreeSounds.org, to look for the sounds I wanted. I had no trouble with any of that.
What I did have trouble with at first was the horse. I found a free PNG image on Clker.com but thought I would try to animate it with costumes to make it gallop. I realized that you can't upload a PNG file to the Sprite editor. It has to be saved as a vector image or (I found out later) a GIF. I spent some time looking for an online image editor that would allow you to create and save an image to GIF. I have Photoshop Elements, but in my classroom my students will be using Chromebooks and I wanted to try to use tools they would have access to also. I did find a nice site called LunaPic that did what I needed.
I still wanted to animate the horse and decided to go ahead and use Photoshop to move the legs on my image. Here's where I ran into the limitations of the 10 block project. After getting started, I realized I couldn't use the block that changed costumes. So much for all that work! That began to be a running issue with some of the things I wanted to try. Again, I couldn't figure out how to make the cat get on the horse and ride off without the use of additional blocks. I also found that I wanted to make things happen based on another event (like the horse would come over automatically after the cat called to it) and I felt limited by the blocks I could use. Below is the code I used for the cat and the horse. As you can see, the horse was much more complicated because I wanted it to start off small and get bigger as it got closer.
I still wanted to animate the horse and decided to go ahead and use Photoshop to move the legs on my image. Here's where I ran into the limitations of the 10 block project. After getting started, I realized I couldn't use the block that changed costumes. So much for all that work! That began to be a running issue with some of the things I wanted to try. Again, I couldn't figure out how to make the cat get on the horse and ride off without the use of additional blocks. I also found that I wanted to make things happen based on another event (like the horse would come over automatically after the cat called to it) and I felt limited by the blocks I could use. Below is the code I used for the cat and the horse. As you can see, the horse was much more complicated because I wanted it to start off small and get bigger as it got closer.
  | Here were the questions posed to us for this project:
I felt that the project made really think about the 10 blocks we were given and imagine what you could do with only those tools. In that way, it was a great exercise in creativity. One look at the 10 Block Studio lets you see how everyone came up with different ideas for utilizing their blocks. On the other hand, I did find it limiting because I had to drop ideas I wanted to try because I couldn't use the blocks I would need. I think it is a good exercise in problem-solving and could definitely see using it as an introductory assignment with my students. |
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