Week 5 (23rd June)

Scratchers 

Scratcher this week worked on the "when sprint clicked" EVENT, shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1:  When this sprite clicked block from the EVENTS block.

The idea was to combine some random action based on last weeks activity with some action such as a "hide" (from the LOOKS block) which should occur when a mouse button is pressed while over the sprite.  Scratchers should watch out for funny effects such as the action not working sometimes.  This can happen if the sprite is busy doing some other complex activity, such as gliding over a time T-seconds.  In such a case, you need to wait for T-seconds before you can click on the sprite.

Gurus  

Gurus continue to work on their primary games.  Many students are close to finishing PONG, but as a Guru, you need to make sure it is really working perfectly.  If there are any weird effects you can't understand talk to me, or another Guru or Apper.  This week we started the mentor program, where 3-Guru's are assigned to work with the Scratchers.  We will select 3 different Guru's each week to work with the Scratchers, as this helps the Guru's refine their skills and helps the Scratchers overcome some stumbling blocks.

Appers

Appers had a different activity this week as described below.  They needed to create an animated GIF by following these steps.

1)      Create some slides in power point of an image.  In each slide, make the picture only slightly different from the previous so that when you flick through the slides, it looks like a  simple animation.
2)      Save the document as a power point file (myfile.pptx).  Then use the “Save As” button and select the “Save as type” as a GIF file (or JPG or PNG)- see Figure 2.

Figure 2: Select the "Save as Type" in powerpoint to a GIF (or PNG)

3)      It will then ask the question shown in Figure 3:

Figure 3:Which slides to export Dialog box

4)      Select “All slides”  This will save every slide in the document to a folder with each slide given a different name.

5) Now go to : http://gifmaker.me/  which will bring you to the screen shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4:  The GIFMAKER main screen

6) Upload you images (all the slides created)

7) Then select the Animation speed to the right

8) Then click “Create GIF animation”

9) Download the resultant GIF.

When you click on this gif it should now run in a browser and be animated.

Activity: 

Check the file size of GIFMAKER.  It’s good to make the GIF files very small to reduce the time it takes to load.

Adjust the “Image size” number of pixels on the right and repeat the above, checking out the effect on the file size when you download it again.

You can now use this GIF as an icon or avatar. 

Here's an example of my snowflake animation that I use for my Scratch ICON.  This file is only 15kbytes in size.