We Do WeDo (Part Deux)
I am taking a course taught by Mitch Resnick at the MIT Media Lab. This year, he is co-teaching it with Sherry Turkle and Karen Brennan is the TA. One of our assignments was to create an animation, story, or game using on and off-screen interaction with Scratch and the LEGO WeDo Robotics Kit.
After Mitch and Karen gave us a short demo on the WeDo and forming teams of 2-3 people, we were given a WeDo kit and a week to make our projects.
My group was inspired by a submarine project from last year, and so we made a similar project using a bird with a scrolling background. But there was a lot of creativity shown in the different projects including stories, games, game controllers, and interactive art. Here are some of the projects:
(Scratch project file and pictures are attached below.)
Bird:
Flobie's Adventure:
Fishing:
Beee:
MIT in Space:
MusicBox:
We were given a week to meet with our group and work on our projects. From our discussion in class regarding the activity, some key takeaways were:
-It's best to do quick, small iterations and frequent testing.
-Debugging can feel different in the physical world versus the virtual world, and trying to debug in a group can also be a different challenge.
-It's difficult to manage how to divide one's time between building the WeDo piece, programming in Scratch, and troubleshooting.
-given the openness of the activity and the materials, each group was able to adjust the project to their own level of difficulty, whether it was making a short animation or a multi-level game.
You can also check out projects from last year's class.
