The children in Togher N.S. have enjoyed exploring their Vex IQ Robotics kits. Please watch their video here.

The next scene in our Fís film involved the “teacher” spotting the PacMan character and blocking his path to the decimal point. The PacMan frowns and sheds a tear. To create this animation the children decided to duplicate and edit the PacMan character. The beauty with creating animations with Scratch is that it is possible to achieve the same results using different methods. Lets have a look at the scene.

The children created the costumes required for the PacMan to frown and shed a tear.

This sequence would also use the costumes from the earlier scene.

Here is the Scratch coding the children used to create the animation.

Drawing the animation frame by frame is the traditional way of creating an animation. It would also have been possible to have the PacMan shed a tear by creating the tear as another sprite and coding it to appear/glide and disappear at the right time and location – some children prefer to code and some children prefer to draw.

Scratch is free to download. The Scratch Offline Editor can be downloaded here.

https://uploads.scratch.mit.edu/scratch2download/

The second part of this scene involves the PacMan jumping up and down with excitement when he sees the dot again but then turning around and walking away dejected when the “teacher” orders him off the screen. Lets have a look at this.

The children needed to duplicate and edit a few more costumes for this part. The coding for this part will also involve a broadcast – this allows two actions to happen at once.

 

 

Our School Excellence – Digital initiative has allowed our school cluster to fund innovative new technologies that introduce children to computational thinking and engineering principles in a fun and engaging way. The three West Cork Schools –  Cappabue N.S, Drinagh N.S. and Togher N.S, have been busy putting these new technologies to good use. Find out more from our latest video.

We are delighted to introduce LEGO Education WeDo 2.0. As part of our School Excellence – Digital project we have invested in these hands-on STEM kits that combine the LEGO brick, classroom-friendly software, engaging standards-based projects and a discovery based approach. Designed with collaboration in mind, each Core Set introduces our children to computational thinking and engineering principles in a fun and engaging way.

Scratch is a programming language and an online community where children can program and share interactive media such as stories, games, and animation with people from all over the world. As children create with Scratch, they learn to reason systematically, think creatively and work collaboratively, .The ability to code computer programs is an important part of literacy in today’s society. When people learn to code in Scratch, they learn important strategies for solving problems, designing projects, and communicating ideas.