March 19, 2020

Hack your window with Scratch. Family creative learning activity

Update (April 7th, 2020): Check the Hack Your Window studio to see lots of examples that people are sharing. I'm sure they'll give you ideas! You can also watch this videotutorial by Frank Sabaté (it's in Catalan but very visual!) where the idea is explained step by step.

Update (April 14th, 2020): Here a videotutorial in English by El Rincón de Primaria.
Now that, because of the confinement due to the COVID19, we look at the world from the window, I propose a family creative learning activity with Scratch.

Take a picture of a window at home, and using Scratch, turn it into a computer game, or into an animated story, an art project, etc. The possibilities are endless, you just have to imagine.

I'm going to share three examples and give you some advice.

Example 1:


Example 2:


Example 3:


Okay, this is very cool, but how do we do it?

If this is the first time you've heard of Scratch, visit the site, register, click "Create", and start exploring a little. You can do some of the tutorials that the website itself will propose, and you'll see that it's very simple!

If you already know a bit about Scratch, here I share with you some very simple steps to turn a picture of a window into a digital animation. But these are just examples, let your imagination fly!

1. We have already taken the picture. Now what?

Go to Scratch, create a new project, and add your photo as a new sprite from your computer. Now, go to "costumes", and with the paint editor you can modify the photo, for example we can cut out the inside part of the window, to make things happen inside. Then you can program this sprite to center it and send it to the front (so the other sprites will pass behind).



2. We add a stage and other sprites

In this example we have emptied the inside part of the window, and now we can put in some more beautiful views. We could use a photo of us, a drawing, a landscape from Internet, etc. Add it to the Scratch project as a stage, then add other sprites! In this example I added two birds and a wizard.


3. Create your game or story

When you have all the elements, now comes the really fun part: explore how to program them to make things happen in your project. For example, make the sprites move, talk, draw... Don't be afraid of making mistakes! For example, my birds move like this:

Important: when you finish your project, share it on the Scratch website, and then add it to this studio, so we can see it, and your project can inspire others.

And if you share it on social networks, please use the hashtags
#HackYourWindow i #ScratchAtHome.


17 comments: