Scratch Day

Last weekend was partially devoted to playing with Scratch and the result of this effort is a little game to help students familiarise themselves with the Computer System Block Diagram

Learn more about this project

There are two sprites in this game that have not been scripted yet. Students can download the game and use the code from the other sprites to make these unscripted sprites operational.

I love Scratch and I love the fact that I can so easily upload and share it. It is not hard to embed it in blogs or I suspect Moodle. I like the way it then plays in the browser. There is a problem uploading Scratch games to the Scratch site from school as there is no way that we can adjust Scratch to our required proxy settings. This is an issue for many schools I would think.

Then I added TeacherTube to the mix. I created a screen capture movie of me explaining how this game worked using CamStudio. I'm very impressed with CamStudio as a free tool for this job. Then Super C was used to reduce the filesize from 108MB to 10MB by reducing the resolution to 640x480. I tried Videora first and while this was easy to use, it produced a product with a resolution that too low to be useful. Thanks to Leigh for his advice on using Videora or SuperC to compress the video. Both of these tools are also free.



I reckon that I could teach SACE 1 Information Technology Systems - Multimedia Programming and Computer Conepts units in an integrated way. Students could use Scratch to create Learning Objects relating to Computer Concepts.