Scratch Joke Book

Contributed by Peter Kirschmann, July 14, 2012

There have been some funny things happening with Scratch at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Q. Why did Julius Caesar buy crayons?

Original Author:
Education Level: Elementary School, Middle School, High School
Content Types: Activity, Sample Scratch Project, Website
Curricular Areas: Language Arts, Technology, Visual Arts
Keywords: animation, jokes

A few weeks ago Kelley Meister, an instructor at the the Science Museum of Minnesota, was teaching a 2 day animation workshop in Scratch. The project that she gave the kids was to animate a joke. The results varied from two sprites telling a joke back and forth to actually animating the narrative of the joke. A group of teens that I work with, the Teen Tech Crew, borrowed the idea for their creative technology workshops in 2 libraries this week with simliar results. In our library workshops, I found that giving this prompt (a joke) along with a bribe (you'll get a laffy taffy for completing your animation) worked better than the traditional Scratch drop-ins we've been doing and far better than trying to do a more formal sit down workshop in a library setting. And I always love it when we have the chance to pull books off the library shelves to help/inspire our Scratch books. While the teens were teaching, I worked my way through the "Kids Book of Historical Jokes," and pumped out the animations.

So, take this and run with it. I've started a Scratch Joke Book to share some of the best, which you can submit your favorite jokes in Scratch here.

A. To mark Antony.