Kawaii Face Maker pt.2

St Patrick’s Online Coding Lessons with Mr Darch

This is part 2 of a fun project that allows us to harness the power of a computer to see a lot of different possibilities in a very short time. In part one of this project we created three different coloured heads, three different eye expressions and three different mouths and used the arrows keys along with on screen buttons to change our cute “kawaii” characters face emotions.

Here in part 2 we’ll arms and legs and control animations with keystrokes from our keyboard. We’ll learn how to code costume loops to control different animation cycles of our character. We’ll also learn how make a one button on/off switch which is super useful in all sorts of situations in Scratch.

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:

Create and control User Interface (UI) elements
Code loops to control various animation cycles of a sprite
Use the Scratch programming language to solve computer science problems in a fun and engaging way.
Read code in the first person to help us understand what’s really going on.
Use the sprite editor in Scratch
Write code to control each sprite (character) in the game
Use loops to repeat parts of our program
Use conditional statements (IF) to allow our program to make decisions about what should happen and when.
Use variables to store and retrieve data from within our game
Use conditional statements in conjunction with variables to make things happen once certain criteria is met
Initialise code in our game to ensure that sprites are in the right place and values stored in variables are reset ready for each play of our game

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

resize the head, eyes and mouth sprites to 100 or whatever is necessary to fit comfortably on your screen
duplicate head sprite
rename it armsLegs

Step 2

delete other head costumes
choose Line tool
set colour to black
set size to 30
draw a line
choose Reshape tool
double click to set point and adjust curve
copy and paste then horizontal flip
repeat for the legs
delete the head
line up with head sprite

Step 3

go to costumes tab
rename 1
duplicate costume 1
take an arm and flip vertical
duplicate and adjust arm to make it wave
repeat until it looks good

Step 4

delete code for armsLegs
complete code for wave as shown in the video and here:

Step 5

duplicate costume 2
swap arms over
write code for dance as shown in video and here:

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 moves could you add?
can you make your character run on the spot?
can you make your character jump?!
what other facial expressions could you add?

Kawaii Face Maker pt.2

St Patrick’s Online Coding Lessons with Mr Darch