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.

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.

As my first project in Scratch, I used the Step by Step intro to make a dancing Scratch cat.  As I followed the directions, I found the screenshots really helpful in figuring out where each of the blocks that I needed were located.

As I began snapping the blocks together, I learned some things about how you can manipulate elements in the script area.  For example, pulling a block separates it from the block above, but also takes with you all the blocks connected underneath.  As I was playing, I sometimes wanted to pull a block from the middle of a group. I learned you had to reorganize the blocks by dragging the ones you wanted to keep up until the block you wanted to remove was on the bottom and could be separated.  There might be an easier way to do this, but I haven't discovered it yet.

Putting together the basic project was pretty quick, but then I wanted to explore sound and movements to see how I could customize my project.  I found the sound blocks tricky.  I wanted to have a drum machine repeat in a loop and at first used the block "play sound drum machine."  This repeated the sound put wouldn't let it play until the end.  I tried putting a "wait" block in and then adjusting the time but I couldn't get a smooth repeat.  Then I noticed the "play sound drum until done" block.  Duh!  This let me play the sound to the end and then it would repeat.  

Next I played with trying to make my cat move across the screen.  I used move, rotate, and glide blocks for different effects.  Once, I make the cat spin off the screen and I had to figure out how to get him back!  I finally ended up using a block to move him to specific coordinates and back.  It's not exactly what I was looking for, but made it more interesting.  

At one point, when playing with my second sprite, the cat sprite wouldn't do the movements correctly.  It would say "Watch me dance!" and then it wouldn't move.  I'm not sure why that happened, but then I changed the movement blocks to something else and and that worked fine.  I'm curious to keep exploring to see if that sort of thing happens often and learn what to do about it.