Lesson 4, part one: Review, and animation

After a few weeks away, the first order of business for lesson four was definitely review.  I printed out the current script for the Pear game, and had The Monster walk through it step by step and explain what each statement does.  There was a lot of work to be done.  Some of the concepts, particularly loops, she remembered perfectly.  However the math required a lot of review.  We were back to square one on circle geometry... but that's OK.

Also I recognized the deep importance of understanding booleans (true/false) for programming.  While The Monster intuitively remembers how IF statements work, the mechanics of it, the judgment of true/false, was not something she could articulate.  I'll be continuing to work with this concept to keep it fresh for her.

Eventually we had walked through the whole project and she could recall what worked and why.  (I took the opportunity as well to talk about division and "remainders," something she's learning about in her regular school math lessons.)  Now it was time to move forward.

We agreed that the spinning character, while an interesting math challenge, really didn't look that great.  So the monster gladly removed this feature from the game.  Now the character slid gracefully from side to side under keyboard controls.  The Monster was pleased.  But I pointed out, the pear looked a bit silly, because though it looked good going left to right, it looked bad going right to left; the single animation frame didn't look so good going backwards.

Here's where a decision had to be made.  In order to create a "looking left" animation frame, I needed to duplicate and mirror the sprite.  This is relatively straightforward using Scratch's "costumes" feature... but if you've never dealt with a pixel editor before, far from intuitive.  I made a decision:  I'm teaching The Monster programming, not pixel manipulation.  I quickly created the mirrored image myself, and named it using Scratch's costumes feature.

Now, armed with two possible animation frames ('costumes'), The Monster could get the Pear to look left or right, corresponding to the left/right movement commands.  On her first go, she got it backwards.  This was not surprising to me - The Monster has a habit of "ready, fire, aim" in her regular math homework, and this came into play here as well.  Only in the case of a computer program, her mistake was immediately obvious.  She quickly fixed it.

Now the Pear moves back and forth, and looks correct doing it.  She immediately started playing with her running code, making the Pear switch directions rapidly, and starting to speak on its behalf.  This was clearly far more engaging!

This was only the beginning of the magic though... stay tuned for Part 2, where The Monster learns the value of tweaking, and creates something very cool.