Fourth graders at Varina Elementary have been learning about the phases of the moon (SOL4.8), so today, students in Ms.Stevens’ class used Scratch to illustrate the phases. First, we signed into our Scratch accounts and created a new project. I showed them how to click on the background button at the bottom and select a space image from the library. Next, we deleted the default Scratch sprite (right click on the cat sprite and choose “Delete”). The students went to the sprite library and chose a character to be the “instructor” who would identify the different phases of the moon. Then we created a new sprite for the moon and just painted different costumes showing the phases in order. To cycle through the costumes, I demonstrated how to use the “Looks” and the “Control” code blocks to command the sprite to switch to the next costume every second forever. We also had to make sure that it always started at the correct place, so our first bit of code set the “Looks” to the first costume. Once our moon was cycling through its phases, we had to make the instructor identify each one. Again, we used the “Looks” and the “Control” code blocks to control it. We set it to “Say” the moon phase for 1 second (since our costumes were cycling every second) forever. However, we discovered that after a couple of cycles the timing was off, so we changed the time for saying the last phase to 1.3 seconds, and that seemed to fix it. Finally, we published our projects and shared the links on Schoology. You can see them all here.
