December 2012 Meetup: Scratch 2.0 Breakout Notes

At the December 2012 ScratchEd meetup at MIT, several of us (Vicki, Rosemary, Derek, Tom, Barbara, me) worked together to:
(1) brainstorm possible extension activities for the Scratch curriculum guide,
(2) explore new features in Scratch 2.0, and
(3) start working on one of the proposed extension activities.

1. Activity Brainstorm
One of my students recently shared how she used playing non-digital games as a starting point for developing digital games. I thought that this might be an interesting starting-point for our breakout session. In our breakout, we brainstormed a list of non-digital games we enjoy playing, without worrying about how easy or hard it would be to implement these games in Scratch.

• Scrabble
• Boggle
• Battleship
• Dress up games
• Candyland
• Jenga
• Lingo/Bingo
• Apples to apples
• Where's Waldo?
• Monopoly
• Sudoku
• Word search
• Line games
• Sand drawing game
• Tetris
• Mousetrap
• Operation

2. Scratch 2.0 Features
Following the games brainstorm, we explored Scratch 2.0, making a list of new features. After 7 or 8 minutes, we regrouped and shared some of the new features that we had noticed, which included make a block, clone, video motion, cloud variables/lists.

3. Project Development
We returned to our list of games, looking for a game that would be (1) reasonably easy to implement, given the limited time we had, and (2) might have an interesting connection to one or more of the new features in Scratch 2.0.

We converged on a body-part matching game -- you have a skeleton and a collection of internal organs (off to the side), and you place the internal organs in the correct position on the skeleton.

After working on the project for about 40 minutes, we took a break to reflect and share our experiences. A few notes:

• The visuals are an important part of this project, and it took a while to find good visual assets. (A challenge further compounded by the very buggy paint editor!)
• There are multiple ways of implementing the "matching" check. For example, Derek used an "invisible target" approach and I used a coordinate-checking mechanism. (I liked Derek's approach more!)
• There are multiple ways of implementing the internal-organ dragging. For example, making the individual sprites draggable versus having the individual sprites follow the mouse pointer.

Generally, I thought that this was going to be a super easy project, but it was more involved than I anticipated -- and could easily be done with Scratch 1.4, not really an exploration of new features in Scratch 2.0. An interesting learning experience overall!

I'm sure I'm missing details -- I hope my fellow breakout group members will add their comments/reflections/reactions!

K