Creative Computing 2011 - Your "Dance Party" project creation experience
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Karen Brennan
Member
July 28, 2011
At this morning's session, we developed a list of questions that we could ask computational creators about their project:
- What was your inspiration for this project?
- How did you do that? (about a particular aspect of the project)
- What did you get stuck on?
- What are you most proud of?
- What will you do next with your project?
Think about a project you've worked on since you arrived -- and respond to one (or several) of these questions in the comments.
Sincerely,
Karen, on behalf of the Creative Computing organizing team
I was making a scratch to introduce my self to the group. It seemed a bit boring having a sprite narrate the story so, dancing seemed a perfect fit. I got a few laughs and it made it more memorable. It was lots of fun making it with a dancing element.
I was a new user of scratch and had to get my head around designing a project. I went with the notion of making two stick people and building on the two original figures by copying and pasting them to form a party. I then began to add faces with different colors. I found the process to be confusing at first but with help from my fellow teachers I finished the project.
I wanted to design a game program that was challenging and interesting to create. I had trouble with some sequencing ( having things happen at the right time) and also I used the Green flag as a way to play the game again which was not a good idea because I couldn't figure out if the program was running for the first time (need to initialize the high score) or if it was just another attempt (keep the high score). I ended up using the space bar to signal another attempt.
I want to add the ability to have multiple players and add difficulty levels.
What was the inspiration for this project?
daning queen & dancing quees2
Just before attending this workshop I ran through the Scratch Tutorials on the homepage.
Along with the themed inspirations of the sessions I added/remix-ed my own projects from the ones created from the tutorials.
What are you most proud of...?
Yesterday I applied what Rivka taught me (using a go to script) to my new project and to assit a colleague.
The about me project
The last project that i worked on was the dance party project. I love the idea that it takes two people to dance. I remember the block parties that we had as i was growing up. This project reminded me of thoes days.
My requirements:
I wanted my sprites to do different kinds of dance moves.
What I did:
To do this, I chose different sprites and used the different costumes for each sprite. I got stuck on using the thinking bubbles and orienting the bubble to show up where I want it to.
Next, I will make my sprites move as they do the dance moves.
My inspiration for the dance project was gardening. This idea came from the trading cards from the first evening and was provoked by browsing the background images in Scratch. I was surprised that there were no flower images, so I had to find one online (I didn't spend much time on this task). I was interested in learning how to make Scratch communicate between objects (broadcast and receive).
Dance Party was fun and it was great to have the group to help with issues that they were struggling with and for others to give me ideas.
I really had no inspiration. I just wanted something that was going to be fun, maybe to "hook kids" into the possibilities when using scratch. Flashy colors, cool music are ways to get kids excited about something new.
I got stuck trying to sequence random costumes
I'm proud of how I was able to make the sequence entertaining
I want to do a project on playing or listening to music notes.
What are you most proud of?
It bothered me how static the sprites looked as I moved them. I heard someone at another table say something about changing an arm on a sprite and that started me exploring possibilities. With the help of people at my table (thanks all) I was able to make the dog's ears pop up as he jumped then down again when he dropped back (via a costume change). Ahhhhh....the endless possibilities!
Which brings up a big issue: I'm a content teacher and somehow I need to keep students' focus on the key content goal of any Scratch projects. I'm thinking collaboration with the art teacher or other specialists might be a way to deal with this issue.
That is a big issue. I will be introducing Scratch to content teachers in the fall and I know they will have the same concerns. But, you wrote that you were bothered until you figured out how to customize your sprite and the students will be too if they don't get time to learn that as well. One suggestion, since they can download Scratch to their home computer you can leave the customizing to home time and work on the subject content in school.
Inspiration
In my dancing project, I wanted to incorporate multiple spinning sprites. I decided to take a picture of my friend, crop the picture, and make a sprite out of his head. I then duplicated his his head several times. I placed the sprites in the corners of the project and had them spin into each other. The four sprites came together and created a stick figure that had my friend's head. Then the stick figure began to dance.
What are you most proud of?
I have been trying to use variables in prior projects but had no success. In this project, I was able to successful incorporate a variable count that allowed me to make all the heads (sprites) disappear at a specifically designed point in the animation. I did not have to rely on timing, which made the animation go much smoother.
I think using a variable countdown for this project is great. You could make it interactive by asking the program user how long should each sprite dance and then assigning the answer to your variable. Play with variable sliders too,
My inspiration for my dance project was realistic dance movement in a MTV video style environment. The project was completed by using two main spriets dancing with a consistently changing background. My biggest challenge was getting the dancers to move in a realistic fashion and this was a matter of coordinating the timing, changing of costumes, and waits. I'm most proud that I was able to accomplish the dance movements somewhat realistically.
I wish to continue the dance project. (I actually wrote "Dance Project" in my porject ideas this morning). I like the flash mob creation. I want to create sprites and coodinate the movements of the sprites in non dance related environment. The challenge here so far is creating the sprites. At first I thought to create in Photoshop but thought that I should try to create using a medium that my students will have access to. So, I 'm trying to create sprites in Scratch.
I wanted to create an interactive dance presentation where the user selected a series of steps simply pressing a key. The hope is that once you have a multiple of steps saved, then you can make the character dance to any song. That is future direction of this project.
Great idea. It could definitely work.
I uploaded my party project.
This was great fun and I can't wait to use it with the kids!!
The inspiration was to use a number of different sprites on a background. Each sprite would do something different and maybe interact in some fashion. I got stuck when I started using a sprite which already had scripts insluded. I thought changing them would be easier than starting from the beginning. It did work for 1 sprite but was more complicated for the 2nd one. I learned a lot fixing the 2nd one. I was proud that I was able to find a way to keep one away from the other by moving sprite 1 to another part of the screen when they got too close. The next time I will add a 3rd sprite.
I wanted to do something different - Never had uploaded a song, wanted two things to do something simultaneously, and I wanted some random aspect. Also, I like jungles and monkeys.
Found my song on google, downloaded it and uploaded to my project.
My song sounded ok off of my desktop but lousy on Scratch. For some reason though, it sounded fine when I uploaded it to the Scratch site.
After walking around the room, I am inspired to use pen and sound more. I want to create a Scratch that has the user choose an instrument and then somehow write their name and each letter or position creates a different note. When played, that is what your name sounds like. We'll see...
I wanted one dancer to do specific moves. Chose the sprite then made 8 costumes by copying,,,editing...and mirror imaging. Worked harder than I had to by not doing those steps in a logical order so I had to make a table to keep track of the moves. Then John presented his project and demo'd the random costume. My "control-freak" tendencies were dashed! (I copied the project and changed it to random...looked just as good.)
Got stuck on positioning the sprite and making him stay put. Set X works wonders. I also didn't pick up on the distinction between the costume number and costume name i.e. costume # 1 is dan2.
Favorite thing I learned today was the duplicate stamp.
I think my next step is to learn how to remix using how other projects; I'm inspired by what others have done so far using Scratch in the timing of different kinds of motion. Sadly, yesterday was my first day actually using the application and so as I'm learning more about the higher level functions - I'm curious on what I can do next. I really want to explore operators, variables, and pen to develop animations or game projects. The duplication of scripts with other sprites helped me with my beach dance party project. I spent the late part of the morning looking through the projects in the ScratchEd resources area for ideas and its really cool to see the curricular connections. Besides the fact that Scratch enhances computational thinking - I'm always trying to make the connections to different subject areas.
Interactive Boston Skyline Xylophone
I was impressed yesterday by the view out of our conference room. This morning we were asked to think about Arts-related ideas. Seemed fun to take the image of the skyline and art-ify or music-ify it.
I experimented with several ways of triggering the music. In both cases, the taller buildings in the skyline photo are the "keys" of a keyboard. My original intent was to have some type of controllable graphic "pointer" slide left and right across the buildings (using a PicoBoard). I got a bit stuck at first, so tried an easier version triggered by the mouse pointer.
The "if" and "touching _______" blocks were important to make this work.
The PicoBoard version still has some bugs. When the pointer-ball is rolled over a building, it is not triggering a musical note.
I had a goal to try using the PicoBoard, so this was one attempt.
Try to get it working. Ask for some feedback from one of the music educators here. (Who are you again?)
For my dance project I was trying to recreate the "Zorba the Greek" dance. I spent most of my time downloading a program so I could get the music off youtube. When I finally did that, I was able to import the music. If I had more time I would have probably created my own characters with multiple costumes, but I worked with one of the available sprites. I learned how to edit and reflect a sprite so that he could dance in different ways. I then wanted to add in another person and have them holding hands and dancing, but I didn't have time to make the second sprite pose the same. So I was able to accomplish about 1/2 of what I set out to do. I did learn a bunch of new things in the art session!
For the dance project I didn' t want a program that people simply watched, but I wanted them to interact with it and have the program respond to their action. I found an existing program sample in Scratch called "Ocean Music Box" which had this sort of interaction. I used that program to create a dance project where the sprites can be moved on the screen by the user. The music changes depending on where on the screen the sprites are placed. I then started working on a new project that uses the pens and would like to incorporate the interactie drawing and the music into one program eventually.
In ELD Dance Party, I got my background inspiration from looking out the window and seeing the water of the Charles River with boats sailing by. I decided to make my dance party on the beach. I wanted to have a boy and girl sprite that each had multiple costumes that I could utilize. I am challenged by getting the sound to work exactly as I would like. I wanted each dancer to have their own music to move by but I'm still haven't gotten it to perform as I would like.
In my dance project, I wanted the 2nd character to appear later (about 15 seconds in). I couldn't figure out how to have char2 come into the picture. I learned to use hide and show commands as well as BROADCAST. The broadcast command was with char1. For example, char2 'shows' when char1 asks 'who?' Char2 has to RECEIVE the command. It really makes you think about every little detail, the order of operations, and the logic of 'if' this, 'then' that.
I am currently building a pong game and I am stuck on bouncing the ball. This is the most complex component of pong. Once this is complete, I can add the other features (such as points, player names, animation, etc).
Another question I can answer is my inspiration for pong. When I first started programming in 1996, my professor in college gave us a homework assignment (that's right...I said a homework assignment) to create a fully functional pong using the java programming environment. I spent approximate 20-30 hours coding and making my pong game. It looked horrible, but it worked. Thus, I feel that it would be poetic to create a new pong game, with nicer features using scratch.
For my dance project, I did a standard one sprite dance sequence. What I found difficult was making my code more concise. The script window gets cluttered pretty quickly. I tried to use the broadcast and receive feature as a way to create subroutines so I could partition sections of code in a more manageable way. I also had to remember to initialize several attributes of the scene and sprite at the start of the program.
For my dance project, I wanted to attempt to draw someone and try to animate a dance move. Since I can't draw, I made a stick figure, but was successful in creating an animation. I initially got stuck on creating another sprite in a different position, but got help from a neighbor on how to use costumes. I wanted to try and synchronize the movements with the music. I was able to do that playing with the wait times between costume changes. Finally, a neighbor suggested I use broadcast to synch the start of the second peice of music between my two sprites. That worked great! Thanks!
The inspiration for my project was our location. Looking at the city and the river reminded me of the song Dirty Water.
One obstacle I occurred was finding the song and then downloading it. Once that was done and it was attached to the stage, I found that it was much too long (3 minutes). I then had to find an editor, free of course, that would allow me to edit the song to a shorter length.
With the new shorter version of the song in place, I then had to readjust the number of “repeats” for each of my sprites so that everything ended at once.
This type of project is one that I can see using in my classroom next year.
My project was to animate some photos of the swivel chairs we are sitting on. I am fairly new to Scratch so I got stuck on keeping the sprites where I wanted them to be. My neighbor was very patient and helpful with my questions. I learned a lot from her. Next I would like to trim the music file I have to fit the short animation. I was inspired by watching the shared animations from the group.
I am currently collaborating on a project to introduce the power of Scratch to both teachers and students. The inspiration for the project came from the idea of forming a computer science advocacy group (using Scratch).
I just started the project, so I am still in the design stage of the program. But I did get the curtains to open up!
What I hope to do, is to have words scrawl up on the stage, explain the importance of Scratch and then demonstrate different math skills via the use of manipulatives.... And then who knows.
I am finding talking and sharing with other teachers at the workshop to be very inspirational (and at times a tad bit intimidating :) )
I did the Dancing Lobster project.
I am proud of successfully controling size and location of the lobster sprite. In particular, setting Initial Conditions.
Next, I want to change the one red lobster dancing to a chorus line of lobsters (maybe different colors) dancing.
In my dance party project I wanted to have two sprites dancing alongside one another. I got stuck quite a bit. Learning some of the basics such initial variables and switching backgrounds was important. If I were to add onto this project or do it again, I would have the sprites interact more, perhaps in a dance battle rather than simultaneously. I think using the Broadcast command would allow me to do this.
At first I was thinking of a specific piece of music that I thought would need sort of an African scene. Since I didn't find something satisfactory in the library, I ended up using a desert scene and changed the song to "Summertime" sung by Billie Holiday. My sprite was a grasshopper in the desert and my biggest challenge was timing him to jump at the point in the music where "fish are jumpin'" happens. This happened during the instrumental introduction and my plan was/is to change to a water scene with fish jumping (using mulitple sprites) when the actual lyrics came in.
For this project I created a simple scenario of a ballerina jumping and gliding in a ballet studio. Next I would like to add several sprites and choreograph a ballet sequence.
I also created a flash mob scene, each script was the same but I changed the "wait" period on each of them. After I finished it, my neighbor shared with me that it would have been easier to to use "broadcast" tiles. I learned something new! :-)
My neighbor was also helpful in showing me about broadcast!
In the Dance Party project, I had a dance contest. Each contestant was identified by A, B or C. The project required the user to press one of the letters to make the contestant dance on the stage. I used the x/y coordinates to glide the sprite from the original postion to the stage to dance then return to their original position. The contest moderator stated the directions to the audience.
A challenge that I had, and still have, I want the sprite to grow when it is on the stage, then return to original size when it returns to original starting position. My challenge is that I don't want the sprite to get too big.
For the dance project, I chose to use two sprites that had multiple poses. I wanted to explore combining the poses to make realistic dance moves. I used the ballerina and played with gravity to have her jump and land gracefully. I used the boy dancer and made him attempt a moonwalk. I got stuck on moving the boy convincingly. Next I would like to record one dancers moves and have another imitate it (like our bossy/bossed exercise).
In the Flash Mob project I wanted to have multiple characters but I wanted them to use the same script. Except for the move to their starting positions, their scripts are the same. I was able to test out one sprite, duplicate it, and then just change it's colors and it's starting position.