Animated Title Maker pt.1

St Patrick’s Online Coding Lessons with Mr Darch

In this project we’ll make a project that lets us animate words and titles in Scratch. We could use this to create titles and credits that we could use in presentations, animations or movies we’ve created as well as other Scratch projects!

Notes for parents: Each child will work at their own pace on this. I’ve uploaded video and written instructions for each step. With Scratch children ideally need access to a keyboard to name sprites and enter numbers but much of this project can be done on an iPad or tablet without any issue.

Children should be encouraged to work at their own pace and enjoy playing with what they’ve made as they go. Do encourage them to watch the video for each step again if they get stuck. Some will complete this is in half an hour, others might like to come back to this project 3 or 4 times to complete it.

Please direct any feedback or suggestions to dave@alittlelearning.org

Happy Scratching!

We are learning to:

Code loops to control movement of sprites
Use random number generators in our programs to create interesting outcomes
Use the Scratch programming language to solve computer science problems in a fun and engaging way
Write code to control each sprite (letter) in the game
Control our program with user input (key stroke presses)
Initialise code in our game to ensure that sprites are in the right place

Getting started

We’ll be using the free web app at www.scratch.mit.edu again for this lesson. You don’t need an account to take part.

Try to watch each video a few times before you read the instructions. This will help you to clearly understand what you need to do.

Go to www.scratch.mit.edu
Click ‘create’ from the top left corner of the screen

What we’re making | preview

Step 1

delete scratch cat sprite
choose all the letters you need for your word
space them out
change their size if necessary

If have more than one of the same letter make sure that number is later in the letter order

Step 2

when space key pressed
go to x: y: for each sprite
set size to 75% or (whatever you changed it to earlier)

Step 3

when up arrow key pressed
go to random position

Step 4

when down arrow pressed
glide for 1 seconds to x: y:

Step 5

create the code as shown in the video and below

Step 6

when right arrow key pressed
set colour effect to
pick random 1 to 200

Step 7

when ‘a’ key pressed
change size by 10
when ‘s’ key pressed
change size by -10

Key learning:

Did you play the game?

What happened when the red dot sprite touched the bug sprite?

That’s right NOTHING!

Why not? Because we haven’t written any code to make that happen!

We need to add more code to make something happen when these sprites touch.

Extension Challenges:

what other ways would you want your letters to move?
could you make your letters follow each other?
could you make your letters all go to the same place and explode out to their correct positions in the word?
could you get your letters to bounce off each other?
could you have more than word on the screen?
could you switch between two or more different words?
could you create an anagram where more than one word can be spelt by the same letters?
could you use a variable to control the amount that the stop motion effect turns?
could you use a variable to control the horizontal position of the whole word?
could you use if/else to make certain things happen when other conditions are TRUE? eg. if letters are touching each other then move apart, if letters are over a certain size bring them back to their intialised state?

Animated Title Maker pt.1

St Patrick’s Online Coding Lessons with Mr Darch