Programming for prospective educators (using Scratch) - unit 3
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==Guidance for students (Open Document Format ODF)==
==Handout for teachers==
Objectives
- The students will analyse a simple interactive, multimedia "story".
They will add an additional scene to the "story".
The students will learn how to design and create "scenes" and "scene changes".
They will experience how to design and realise animations.Introduction
- The fascination of programming is mainly due to the immense variety of possible applications.
- With computer programs we can find the shortest road connection between two places, transfer money from one account to another, translate a text from one language to another, send an e-mail, watch films and much more.
- Programs can also be entertaining and instructive. Games and interactive stories on the PC or smartphone, for example, appeal to many people. Animations make it easier to recognise contexts and promote understanding of processes. Such applications are often multimedia-based; they convey a variety of sensory impressions with texts, pictures, sounds and possibly also music and video clips.
- In this lesson the students will extend the provided example of an interactive multimedia "story" with another "scene". The example should enable the users to discover interesting places in a city (St. Gallen, Switzerland).
Getting familiar with the example program
- The students should first familiarise with the project "Discover St. Gallen" from the user's point of view.
- The project is published on the Scratch website and can be downloaded from there to the student´s own computer: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/694608954
- The project is the template for a multimedia-based, interactive discovery tour of localities in the city of St. Gallen. One scene of this "story" is accompanied by sounds. The students must have activated the audio output on their devices in order to hear the sounds. You might need to point this out.
Analysing individual scenes
- The students should then adopt the programmer's perspective and analyse the scripts of individual scenes: What do the scripts do? Which media are used? How do the scenes change?
- Above all, the analysis should encourage the students to ask questions. It might be useful to collect the questions in a common online pad (e.g. eduPad: https://edupad.ch). This allows the students to support each other and the teacher can give impulses, additions and clarifications if necessary.
Interactive «story telling»
- This chapter explains the procedure for designing an interactive story.
- The students should use the suggested procedure to add an additional scene to the story. They can use the costumes and scripts from the template to create the new scene.
- The students create the new scene by duplicating an existing scene (character) in the template. For the "costume", the students have to change the picture. To do this, they need the file "Bangor, valley station of the Mühleggbahn in St. Gallen", which they can find on Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22Bangor%22,_Talstation_der_Mühleggbahn_in_St._Gallen.jpg).
- Designing the scenes of a story is a creative task. It offers the students a relatively free play. There is no "correct solution" for this task. Nevertheless, the additional scene should fit into the "story" in terms of content and appearance. This also applies to the adaptation of the sequence of scenes. Feedback of peers is an alternative for this task, or at least a useful supplement to an assessment by the teacher.
Animations
- This chapter explains how animations are (can be) designed and programmed.
- The students should use the suggested procedure to program the animation that visualises the route from the station to the Mühleggbahn on the city map.
- This task should not pose any major difficulties for the students. However, some students may find it difficult to adapt the sequence of scenes. This is simply because they need to provide an additional message to trigger the scene "Mühleggbahn".
- For this lesson, too, an online pad can support the students (to formulate questions, to exchange answers and script "snippets").
Reflection
- Programming is often a creative activity. However, programming an interactive "story" is also demanding and sometimes quite time-consuming.
- Therefore, there are special apps for the realisation of digital "stories" (e.g. "Actionbound"), which reduce the number of programming steps for the authors. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of such apps for use at school.
Musterlösung
Authors: Bruno Wenk, Dieter Burkhard Translation: Patricia Berchtel
